May 30, 2024 - 7:00am

Are we now to get the violins out for men and their desire to ogle scantily clad women? The new executive editor of Loaded, Danii Levy, thinks so, following her decision to relaunch the magazine as an online portal. This move comes after a nine-year hiatus, with Levy claiming that the magazine can serve as an outlet for men living in a world that has “gone PC-mad”.

Levy is right and wrong. She is right that porn has usurped and, to some degree, made the ogling landscape more toxic for men, and that the middle ground of common or garden ogling has become far more complicated and freighted with consequences than it used to be. “A weird dichotomy has opened up in society where there is an attitude that no one can say or do anything but then when you open social media it is full of porn,” says Levy. “Loaded is seeking to occupy the middle ground and say it is okay to appreciate beautiful women. Men need to have a safe place to read stuff like that and secretly relate to it.”

Perhaps. She is wrong, however, in arguing that male needs are unmet because men are cowed out of pursuing them in any above-board way thanks to PC culture which, although powerful at the cultural level, is not what ultimately matters when strong urges surface. But something interesting, and related, may be happening. Men may actually be less keen on ogling women than they used to, and not just because of the shifting sands around “consent” and what counts as harassment, although all this must certainly reduce men’s appetite for ogling women. After all, the cost-benefit analysis has changed.

It would seem that there’s something else at play: the internet has seen to it that women have become old hat now to the most sexually jaded generation of Western men in history. They are, as Levy points out, completely awash in all sorts of women in any number of portals and contexts, from reality TV to OnlyFans where they can pay for personalised visual treats.

I always trace men’s eyes when a beautiful woman in revealing clothes enters an Underground carriage or walks in front of them on the street. Lately, I’ve noticed they barely look up, let alone stare or catcall. This observation, however, is countered by statistics which suggest high rates of street harassment (though this is partly to do with increased reporting of such harassment and a wider scope of criminal behaviour).

This relative indifference may signify a neurological change in some men: the chemical cocktail of serotonin and dopamine leading to arousal, and the reflex to look or stare, seems to have been at least partially deactivated. This is not all a matter of conscious decision, but instead a long-term reaction to the transformation of naked women from a rare or somehow taboo entity to something available widely, at the tickle of a phone screen.

So, the new Loaded will provide more eye candy, but whether it can (or should try to) compete by being a “middle ground” in a landscape already saturated with such eye candy may be wishful thinking, a relic of marginally more innocent times.


Zoe Strimpel is a historian of gender and intimacy in modern Britain and a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. Her latest book is Seeking Love in Modern Britain: Gender, Dating and the Rise of ‘the Single’ (Bloomsbury)
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