Lads' mag push-back against "fundamentalist feminist nonsense"

A former editor of Front, one of the so-called "lads' mags" that the giant UK supermarket chain Co-Op is requiring to be sold in "modesty bags", attacked the chain for caving in to "fundamentalist bullying". According to a post on Press Gazette, Piers Hernu (now a features editor at the Daily Mail) said the Lose the Lads' Mags campaign was "fundamentalist feminist nonsense".

The publishers of other such titles, Nuts and Zoo, have told the Co-Op that they won't stock their titles in the stores rather than comply with the edict. They had already agreed to "tone down" their covers to avoid a ban by Tesco, the biggest retailer. Hernu is not convinced.

“Magazines all sell on their front covers so if you obscure it you’ll strangle it at birth,” said Hernu. “So you are consigning it to economic doom.”

Responding to claims from Kat Banyard, founder of UK Feminista, that magazine such as Front, Zoo and Nuts were pornographic, Hernu said: “Women in bikinis is not what I would call pornography.”