Lad Culture is getting a bit of a bad reputation at the moment and it’s easy to see why. Take a trip out into the nightlife of provincial towns and cities in the UK and you’ll most likely find a new generation of ‘Lads’. A generation of infantile males who get their ass cheeks out for night club photos, sink pints of piss and who seem to have a special gift of estimating a girl’s ‘moistness’ just by glancing at them. ‘Lad Culture’ has become an offensive, moronic group of complete juvenility. But it hasn’t always been this way.
Lad culture has produced a new type of lad: ‘Hench Lad’. Many lads right now have just a finished a solid six months of getting stacked and attending EDM warehouse raves while rinsing YouTube tutorials on how to shuffle, all in preparation for their ‘Lads on Tour’ holiday this summer. The lads will be jetting off to the Balearic sands for sex, sea and cheap ouzo alongside getting a tattooed backside. Above all, they will be demonstrating why the rest of the world hate Brits. They’re easy to spot: hairless from the eyebrows down, tarnished with a sunbed tan and dressed in a skintight River Island T-shirt displaying a picture of a city they have never been to. These creatine-addled lads don’t get very creative with their tattoos either, marked with a design their mates pulled from the third page of Google images under the search “Sleeve Tattoos for men”. You’ll find them loitering around dive bars ‘on the pull’ armed with their wingmen, sinking bottles of VK, ready to pounce on girls who have had one too many glasses of Echo Falls. Between bars they will be most likely shouting “get your tits out” down a traffic cone in an attempt to serenade a young Juliet before marching onto a club where they will be dancing like a sexually induced gorilla – thrusting behind females while belting out ‘Heroes’ by Alesso. Every weekend they repeat the process, striving to add to their ‘shag count’. The great British gentleman is officially dead. As the years progress on, the arm holes on vest tops get wider and the collars on V-neck T-shirts get deeper. At what point in history were working class icons like Liam Gallagher exchanged for complete and utter melts like ‘Gaz G Shore’?
It’s hard not to blame shows like TOWIE, Geordie Shore, and Made in Chelsea for this grim development in the male specie: shows that glorify cheating on girlfriends and womanising. They are branded ‘reality’ television shows – a complete misnomer. It’s certainly not reality to get ‘mortal’ 5 out of 7 nights a week, aiming to 3-way kiss with 2 girls, but that’s the image that Geordie Shore portrays. This portrayal has had an adverse effect on both sexes. I’m sure most people will be aware of the girl who participated in a blowjob marathon in Magaluf in return for a £4 cocktail – the type of behaviour that receives a sort of Biblical respect amongst lads. It’s always been well documented that when society jets off to the Balearic Islands they lose inhibitions, a side-effect of the escapism of the everyday monotony back home, but there’s been an increase in this absurd behaviour. Reality TV doesn’t exactly censure such activity. Prior to reality TV shows, it was unheard of for a man to have a lifestyle of pumping iron, tanning beds and Veet hair removal cream. Lads are bigger than ever, yet they take a shine to One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer. That’s the irony – lads are getting stacked, yet they are getting more feminine than ever.
It would be unfair to hone in on the maximuscle-induced end of the spectrum of a much more ubiquitous culture. It seems there are younger generations of lads emerging, trying to emulate the puerile acts of their older patriarchs. You’ll typically see them on shows such as Magaluf Weekender or Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents with a strong enthusiasm to lose their fingering virginities. You can tell it’s not their usual scene, of Runescape and Star Wars conventions. They are sold a false celestial notion of guaranteed sex, when in reality the only boobs they will touch are the tit-shaped sweets on a lolly stick. That’s the infectious effect of lad culture. Lads who once wore Velcro shoes at school are trying to live up to this false, optimal LADness by drinking themselves to oblivion in the ‘lads on tour’ sunshine.
Lad culture is also rife with students. Campuses are becoming a galaxy where being branded a ‘UNIlad’ is more important than obtaining a degree. Every year freshers leave home for a pastures new, a rite of passage which involves becoming a member of the Inbetweeners cast, masturbating over posts on the LADbible and occasionally studying. In the midst of complementing each other’s Bob Marley posters, academic brains and creative endeavours are cultivated into constructing new sentences and phrases containing the word ‘banter’: “Archbishop of Banter-bury”, “Ed Mili-Bant”, “Bant Sinatra”, “Barak O-Banter”, “make sure you have some coins for the Banter-bus”, “are you drinking Banter fruit twist tonight?”, “I’m going for a first in Banter-cology” – The phrases are infinite.
Banter Checklist
- Drinking your own sick – banter.
- Throwing beer over a friends head – banter.
- Missing lectures – banter.
- Spotting the talent in lectures – banter
- Sucking bottles of Biére Spéciale through a beer bong – banter.
- Putting a wet floor sign next to a girl – banter.
- Walking home with a traffic cone on your head – a display of exquisite banter.
Everything is done in the name of banter. Banter can be a beautiful thing – bantering about each other’s shit clothes, harmlessly flirting with girls, jestingly ripping someone else’s misfortune. Indeed, it would seem that banter is an excuse for almost anything – misogyny, rape jokes or even sexual assault. This is where lad culture has taken a turn for the worst. Lads worship at the shrine of the Holy LADfather himself: Dapper Laughs (supposedly a comedy act) who enhances the popularity of this brand of miseducated humour. He makes six-second vines of LAD-antics: rating girls on moistness, describing cock size and making deeply sexist comments towards shop assistants. Regardless of whether ‘Dapper’ is a soubriquet, this type of humour is harmful idiocy, and people are emulating it. Negative lad culture has always been present in society, but we could do without the utilitarian television figureheads like Dapper Laughs provide.
Of course, lad culture does have positive facets. Take camaraderie in sports teams, special nights out in cities, dressing in suits, singing drunken versions of Don’t Look Back in Anger and regurgitating quotes from Step Brothers. Granted, you take plenty of grief when you swap games of FIFA for spending some time with your girlfriend, but its your fellow lads that bring you back down to earth when you most need it. This type of lad culture is relatively harmless and somewhat enjoyable – it’s the male bravado which makes the weekends worthwhile. It makes workdays, commited studying and everyday mundanities all make sense. This type of lad culture is worth living for.
This socially healthy culture is being saturated with morons and it’s receiving bad press. It needs to stop. Reality TV is having a damaging effect on society – a more studied approach needs to be taken when thinking about how the shows might be received and as for Dapper Laughs, rape jokes will never have a place in society.
Lad culture is certainly going through a rough phase. Take a step back lads, shake yourselves out of your vest tops and stop being infantile douches.
Words by Aaron Spencer