ABSTRACT
The long-established market for women’s magazines in the UK ranges from monthly fashion and lifestyle magazines to weekly publications. Lifestyle magazines for women have been widely criticized for upholding traditional notions of femininity and undermining feminism by appropriating and accommodating its discourses, thereby limiting women. In addition to women’s magazines, critical (feminist) linguist studies of language and gender have also turned to men’s lifestyle magazines. The men’s magazine market, small in comparison to the women’s market, only started in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the launch of Arena, Gentleman’s Quarterly (GQ) and Esquire, all rather upmarket publications, which propagated an alternative form of masculinity, the ‘new’ man. In 1994, the launch of the more mid-market Loaded marked the beginning of another media-created male identity, the modern British ‘lad’, opposed to the ‘new’ man, and reverting to a more traditional stereotype of masculinity, interested mainly in beer, football and sex.
