What have we got to lose? Feminist campaigning and the exclusion of sex from the supermarket

ABSTRACT

This article explores the discourses deployed by the Lose the Lad’s Mags Campaign, primarily between 2013 and 2014. The campaign aimed at persuading retailers to stop stocking and selling ‘lads mags’ on the grounds that they were sexist and in breach of the equality law. We identify how the campaign deployed discourses of the free market, asserting the right of consumers to choose to be ‘free from exposure’ to such representations, but also more problematic binaries within the campaign introducing class distinctions into the policing of sexuality and ultimately shifting the focus onto the presence of sex, not sexism, within public spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Lose the Lads Mags Campaign
• feminism
• censorship
• pornography
• public space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The site does state that a summary will be provided on request. We submitted a request via email in January 2014, but did not receive a response.

2 Twenty-two of 34 articles published between May 2013 and January 2014.

3 Twenty-three of 34 articles published between May 2013 and January 2014.

4 See, for example, Phil Hubbard’s analysis of the ‘moral panic’ leading to the creation of Sections 46 and 47 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act, ‘making it an offence to place advertisements relating to sex work in, or in the immediate vicinity of, a public telephone box’ (2002, 353). Hubbard notes that ‘the construction of the decent citizen is gendered and aged, based around the heteronormal assumption that pornography caters to male sexual urges and that it is women and children who need protecting from its corrupting influence’ (2002, 358).