Lad culture (also the new lad, laddism) was a media-driven, principally British and Irish subculture of the 1990s and early 2000s. The term lad culture continues to be used today to refer to collective, boorish or misogynistic behaviour by young heterosexual men, particularly university students.
In the lad culture of the 1990s and 2000s, the image of the "lad"—or "new lad"—was that of a generally middle class figure espousing attitudes typically attributed to the working classes. The subculture involved heterosexual young men assuming an anti-intellectual position, shunning cultural pursuits and sensitivity in favour of drinking, sport, sex and sexism. Lad culture was diverse and popular involving literature, magazines, film, music and television, with ironic humour being a defining trope. Principally understood at the time as a male backlash against feminism and the pro-feminist "new man", the discourse around the new lad represented some of the earliest mass public discussion of how heterosexual masculinity is constructed.
Lad culture as a mainstream cultural phenomenon peaked around the turn of the millennium and can be seen as going into decline as the market for lad mags collapsed in the early 2000s, driven by the rise of Internet. Nonetheless, the stereotype of the lad continued to be exploited in advertising and marketing as late as the mid-2010s.
Though the term "lad culture" was predominantly used in Britain and Ireland, it was part of a global cultural trend in the developed English speaking world. The title of a 2007 book by the gender studies academic David Nylund about USA Sports Radio, "Beer, Babes and Balls" mirrors the three stereotypical interests of the "lad."
The American term Bro culture is clearly closely related, though originated around two decades later than the term lad culture and therefore needs to be understood against a different cultural context.
In popular culture
Lad culture did not emerge organically as with earlier British male sub-cultures such as the mods of the 1960s; rather it was a media creation. The term "new lad" was first coined - as a response to then popular concept of the new man - by journalist Sean O'Hagan in a 1993 article in the magazine Arena. The concept was developed and sustained across a diverse range of media: there was a literary component - lad lit; it was closely associated with the musical style brit pop and with certain television shows and stand-up comedians; a number of glossy, violent films in the later 1990s were also popularly linked to lad culture. Most important in shaping and popularising lad culture, though, was the lad mag a new style of lifestyle magazine for young, heterosexual men that became suddenly popular in the mid-1990s.
Lad mags
Lad mags included Maxim, FHM and Loaded.
Television
The television sitcom Men Behaving Badly. Al Murray's Happy Hour and They Think It's All Over were television programmes that presented images of laddishness dominated by the male pastimes of drinking, watching football, and sex.
Film
Lad culture grew beyond men's magazines to films such as Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Irony
Lad culture was strongly associated with an ironic position. The strapline of the leading lad mag Loaded was "for men who should know better." The BBC in a 1999 review called "Our Decade: New Lad Rules the World" identified that one of the key concepts associated with lad culture (alongside curry and foreign stag weekends) was "anything being acceptable if its "ironic"." Humour in lad mags and in television comedy was a major element of lad culture: the ironic position allowed comedians to both identify themselves as opposed to and, at the same time, indulge in racist, sexist and homophobic jokes.
Part of the ironic position can be seen in relation to the term lad itself. Despite the ubiquity of lad culture in the media of the 1990s there was no expectation that real, individual men would seriously identify themselves as lads: to do so would be to invite ridicule. This was a form of distinctively British class play: middle or aspiring middle men were playing at being working class. A 2012 National Union of Students report citing the academic John Benyon identified how "Uncensored displays of masculinity during the 1990s were deemed by those involved to be ironic by their very nature. He [Benyon] highlights how the magazine Loaded consciously reduced working class masculinities to jokes, interest in cars and the objectification of women, and dismissed criticisms as humourless attacks on free speech which failed to see the ironic nature of the representations."
