Page 117 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

106 • Sport, Media and Society

The contents of Men’s Health magazine are similarly assembled and presented in
a particular style of address to the reader. Benwell (2004) dated the launch of men’s
lifestyle magazines in the United Kingdom to 1986, pointing to the strategies that
were quickly deployed to cajole men into ‘the explicit adoption of the feminized
role of the consumer’ (Benwell 2004: 4). The tone that was used was very different
from that of women’s lifestyle magazines. Instead, the magazines were constructed

to communicate ‘strident aspiration, unassailable confidence, a lack of intimacy, and
an objectifi cation of women’ (Benwell 2004: 4). Benwell went on to argue that this
style has evolved in a complex way to negotiate between the competing demands of
consumerism and hegemonic masculinity.
In the United Kingdom, a particular form of men’s magazine has been associated
with ‘the new lad’: a media-driven variant of masculinity that emerged as a backlash
against the politically aware new man of the early 1990s. The British Broadcasting
Corporation News Online’s E-cyclopedia describes the 1990s as the decade of the
new lad, unashamedly into football, drinking and women (‘Our Decade’ 1999). The
magazine that catered most directly for ‘laddish’ masculinity was Loaded. Benwell
(2004) has pointed to the similarity between the contents of Loaded and other con-
sumer magazines: letters pages, advice, handy hints, features, interviews, advertis-
ing and, like women’s lifestyle magazines, fashion, health and beauty. What marked
out the lad’s magazine as different, she argued, was the tone: ‘invariably light and
jocular, and even when it is not, the tone militates against anything being taken too
seriously (personal advice pages, for instance, are present but only in satirical form
in Loaded)’ (Benwell 2004: 5).
The style of the UK version of Men’s Health, in particular, needs to be understood
in this context. An article, for example, on muscle is titled the lazy man’s guide
to growing muscle and features an image of a supine male collapsed into an arm-
chair, naked but for his shorts, with clearly defined muscle tone and Homer Simp-

son slippers at his feet. Each of the article’s five steps to growing muscle start with

take it easy and encourages rest between sets, rest between exercises, more time
in the shower, more massages and more time asleep. The inset reads ‘Memo to self.
73%. the amount more likely you are to be OBESE if you sleep under four
hours a night.’ This research is credited to University of Chicago Medical Centre.
Below the main article is another smaller one—a series called secret muscle fo-
cusing on the rhomboid. This article’s title asserts that you can fix your caveman
stance by pumping your back up and suggests that slouching at a desk may be one
cause of hunched shoulders, as well as too much time spent under the bench press.

This jokey presentation of health and fitness advice enables the magazine to feed the
reader’s anxieties and desire for a better body while reassuring him that his resistance
to exercise is also a sign of masculinity.

Benwell (2004: 13) suggested that ‘magazine masculinity is defined by a contin-
ual oscillation between different masculine identities, namely a form of heroism and
antiheroism.’ Movement between these positions results in a particular kind of irony