A former ‘lads mag’ editor has spoken of his shame for defending the publication which he now believes encouraged young men to access hard core pornography.
Martin Daubney, who edited Loaded magazine for eight years, said becoming a father and turning 40 radically changed the way he looked at things.
Now he is concerned about an “emotional time-bomb” for the next generation of young men as children get desensitised by online access to pornographic images.
Change
Mr Daubney took over at Loaded in 2002. He said his magazine gave its readers exactly what they wanted but “the more we gave them, the more they demanded — and the racier we had to become in order to satiate their desires”.
He said that he became a “skilled defender of the indefensible” as he took on critics of his publication.
But the former Loaded editor said his life “changed for ever” when he became a father in 2009. “A month later”, he added, “I turned 40. Almost overnight, my world view changed”.
Dabble
He commented: “I started seeing the women in my magazine not as sexual objects, but as somebody’s daughter.”
And Mr Daubney, who became a stay-at-home father after leaving the magazine in 2010, went on: “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?”
Regret
Mr Daubney added: “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.”
Mr Daubney admitted: “We were normalising soft porn, and in so doing we must have made it more acceptable for young men to dive into the murky waters of harder stuff on the internet. And, for that, I have a haunting sense of regret.”