'Lads' mags' describe women using the same language as sex offenders, according to a new study.
Researchers at Middlesex University distributed quotes on pieces of card to 20 men and women and asked them to rank how degrading they were to women. They were then told that some of the quotes were for from lads' magazines and some were from interviews with convicted rapists, and asked them to guess which quotes were from which group.
The quotes were taken from The Rapist File: Interviews With Convicted Rapists by Sussman & Bordwell and also from the mainstream magazines, Nuts, Loaded, Zoo and FHM.
Dr Miranda Horvarth, a senior lecturer in forensic psychology at Middlesex University who specialises in researching sexual violence, told The Guardian: "The group guessed correctly 50% of the time. They clearly had considerable difficulty making quick decisions about where these quotes came from."
In a similar study, the same researchers asked 92 men aged between 18 and 46 to say which quotes they most identified with, without being told what the sources of the quotes were.
Shockingly, more of the men agreed with the rapists' statements, only changing their position when the source of the quote was revealed.
Horvarth said: "The apparent normalising effect of lads' mags runs counter to the work that is done with sex offenders both in prison and the community. Sex offender programmes challenge the men on them about their sexist, misogynistic and derogatory beliefs about women and seek to reeducate them. Yet it appears that some similar beliefs have been presented in recent lads' mags, which are normalised and accepted in mainstream society."