Former Loaded editor Martin Daubney weighs in on petition to ‘bin’ controversial lads mag ZOO

THE former editor of the world’s biggest lads’ mag Loaded says ZOO magazine is getting too close to the line between clever and crass.

Cover of Zoo Weekly magazine for 20/08/07 with the controversial win a boob job for your girlfriend competition.

MARTIN Daubney used to run an office full of lads, lads who produced the most successful “lads’ mag” in history.

“More birds, less words” is the way he described the demands of the 500,000 readers who consumed the content religiously each month. Staff played along but the race to the bottom came at a price.

During his tenure as editor of Loaded magazine, the Londoner saw it all. Huge success and huge backlash. He was verballed regularly, accused of enabling rape culture and told on more than one occasion that he was turning curious young men into monsters.

“I was accused of being a women hater, that I encouraged violence towards women,” Daubney told news.com.au.

At the time — Daubney edited Loaded between 2002 and 2010 — the fight to remove titles including Loaded, ZOO and Nuts from shelves in the UK was at fever pitch. It was the “political hot potato” of the time, he says, and even the PM was involved.

Highly sophisticated women’s rights groups mobilised the Lose the Lads’ Mags movement. The movement was supported by a study suggesting everyday punters could not distinguish between comments made by a rapist and comments inside a lads’ magazine. The result was a resounding victory for the Lose the Lads’ Mags movement and a change in what it meant to be a “lad”.

“The thing that really bothered me about all of this was that young men were being condemned as being porn zombies: they watch porn, they absorb the message, soft porn leads to hard porn, hard porn leads to violence,” Daubney said.

So, he decided to do his own research.

“I wanted to give men a voice and a chance because a narrative had taken hold that men were sh*t,” he said.

“I was meeting sex addicts and psychologists who were treating the worst sex offenders in the country. I wanted to know if men’s magazines were a part of this. All I can say is that that wasn’t the case. (Sex offenders) are proceeding straight to the hard stuff.”

It didn’t matter. Modesty boards were erected in supermarkets and Nuts was asked to put its product in a modesty bag.

Daubney left Loaded after his son was born. He said he realised being a lad and being a dad were incompatible. Soon after, Nuts shut up shop completely. Loaded closed its doors last year. ZOO is the last remaining of the big three lads’ mags in the UK but it too is struggling.

Fast forward seven years and Australians are fighting the exact same fight.

Activist group Collective Shout launched a petition last year to ban ZOO from supermarket shelves at Coles and Woolworths. The petition has been signed by 37,000 people but nothing has changed.

ZOO is doing itself no favours. In April, staff did the unthinkable when a bikini-clad model graced the front cover of an Anzac special edition, replete with a poppy. There was a defamation case against an Australian politician and a competition to “Win a boob job for your girlfriend”.

Collective Shout claims ZOO “makes a buck by promoting a culture of rape and violence to our kids via supermarkets” at a time when domestic violence is spiralling out of control.

Daubney says language can be a big problem, so can the climate ZOO it finds itself publishing in.

“There’s a very fine line between being clever and being crass. I know I stayed on the right side my whole career,” he said.

“If you start to use derogatory terms for women like ‘bitch’ or ‘skank’, if you talk in a way that you appear to be brazenly misogynistic then you’re inviting trouble.

“When you sound a bit like a woman hater then I think you’re going to get trouble, and you consistently do, particularly on social media where we’re seeing highly sophisticated women’s rights groups circulate problems and very quickly motivate high numbers of people to sign up.

“(ZOO) made themselves a soft target at a time when a lot of retailers are looking at these magazines and saying, ‘Are we making enough money out of these magazines?’”

Are supermarkets likely to bin ZOO anytime soon? Daubney doesn’t think so. He said the argument that supermarkets were “ethically responsible” didn’t fly.

“If they were, they wouldn’t sell cigarettes or alcohol,” he said.

But it doesn’t mean ZOO will survive.

“You’d have to be a fool to think demand wasn’t smaller than it once was. Titles do get by selling a limited number of copies. If they want to keep publishing then fine, but you would have to argue that the sun is setting on men’s mags.

“Their summer is behind them. They’re entering their disgraceful old age. Are they ageing badly or are they aging well? The only person who can decide that is the consumer and right now they’re saying they still want them.”

Bauer Media Group, which owns ZOO Weekly, was approached for comment but did not respond.

Originally published as Former Loaded editor Martin Daubney weighs in on petition to ‘bin’ controversial lads mag ZOO