One of the more interesting articles I’ve come across lately was a piece in the UK Daily Mail by Martin Daubney, the longest running editor of the British magazine “Loaded”. He recounts sitting with his team back in 2006, meticulously tallying the number of bare nipples that appeared in each issue of their competitors’ magazines. That month, Maxim had over 80, beating their magazine out. Daubney pushed his team to beat out the competitor’s nipple count, launching the “We Love Boobs” special, which weighed in with over 200 nipples. Daubney explains that to him, “It was all just harmless fun… Loaded’s winning formula was more birds, less words… moral naysayers were party poopers, and if they attacked, I’d attack back harder
Back then, it never occurred to Daubney that the magazine was objectifying women or doing any harm. Duabney “fiercely denied that Loaded was a ‘gateway’ to harder pornographic magazines.” Daubney knew that if they were classified as a “top-shelf” pornographic mag, the associated plastic magazine wrappings would have been commercial suicide.
His thoughts started to change, however in 2009, when his son was born. Becoming a father “had such an effect on [Daubney] and changed his views so forcibly” that within a year, he quit what he had thought was his dream job, because in his mind, his position had become a moral nightmare. As he explains, “When I look back now, I see we were severely pushing the envelope of what was considered decent. We were normalizing soft porn, and in so doing, we must have made it more acceptable for young men to dive into the murky waters of the hard stuff on the Internet. And for that, I have a haunting sense of regret… When I became editor in 2002, I realized all our readers really wanted was acres of flesh. The trouble was, the more we gave them, the more they demanded—and the racier we had to become to satiate their desires.”
As access to online pornography increased, Loaded’s sales started to plummet, so they “turned up the volume even further in a desperate bid to stay alive.” Single shots of models with smiling faces were replaced with oiled torsos and fake lesbian orgies. As the content in the mag became more and more pornographic, Daubney said that he became a “defender for the indefensible”.
With the birth of his son, however, he started to become secretly ashamed of what he did for a living:
My life had become a charade, switching between diametrically-opposed extremes — nipples by day and nappies (diapers) by night. I started seeing the women in my magazine not as sexual objects, but as somebody’s daughter. To think that the girls who posed for our magazine had once had their nappies changed, had once been taught to take their first steps and had once been full of childlike hope . . . it was almost heartbreaking.
I was confronted by the painful thought that maybe Loaded was part of the problem. Was it an ‘enabler’ to young teenage boys who’d consume harder porn later, in the same way dabbling with cannabis might lead to stronger addictions to cocaine or heroin? Then, in July 2010, it was announced that terminally-wounded Loaded was to be sold to a small publisher with a murky reputation. It was the excuse I needed to leave. I woke up and thought ‘I can’t do this any more’ and quit.
The prospect of having to tell my son — and his friends’ parents — that I worked for a company linked to pornography was pivotal. As the father of a young child, working in such a place would be indefensible.
I suddenly wanted to vanish and do something decent with my life. I became a house dad, which fulfilled me more than Loaded ever had.
Now, nearly two years on, I am ashamed at the way I used to defend my magazine.
Offering excuses for pornography when Loaded was attacked left me feeling cheap and hollow. I became a person I wasn’t, and, looking back, one I didn’t like. Today, I find myself agreeing with some of my fiercest former critics.
When I edited Loaded, I’d often get asked ‘Would you want your daughter to appear in topless photos?’ and I’d squirm, but feel obliged, but ashamed to say ‘yes’. Fortune gave me a son, but not on my life would I want any daughter of mine to be a topless model. Looking back at my old job, I think it kept me and my team in a morally-retarded state. We became numbed to nudity. We treated our models as crude sales devices.
[I’ve realized that mags like Loaded] sells boys the debasing view of women as one-dimensional fakes: fake boobs, fake hair, fake nails, fake orgasms and fake hope. How will these tainted children be able to interact with real women later in life if the first ones they ‘meet’ are on-screen mannequins?
[When children have] free access to pornographic images, the next generation of young men are becoming so desensitized, I genuinely fear we’re storing up an emotional time-bomb. Porn objectifies women, demeans and cheapens them, because it sells a fantasy where men are always in control and get what they want. But real life isn’t like that. In porn, women cry, ‘yes, yes, yes!’ but in real life, they often say, ‘no’. Not all men have the intelligence or moral fortitude to understand they cannot take what they want. Today, it’s never been easier to get your hands on porn of the most grotesquely graphic nature, yet absolutely nobody admits responsibility. And most shocking of all is the total lack of moral accountability displayed by the Internet pornographers when it comes to supplying their product to minors.
As Daubney highlights, kids today have free and easy access to pornography through the Internet, and the responsibility of protecting kids from harmful content online rests on your shoulders, as parents. We strongly recommend that you use a filter and accountability software on all Internet-enabled devices (like our X3watchPRO) to protect your kids. And also recognize that even soft-core and so-called “lads” magazines can still have a profound impact on your sons and daughters. Magazines like GQ, Maxim, Cosmo, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, etc. can be a gateway drug for your kids to start wanting harder and harder core-content.