So the other day as I made my way up The Terrace to attend some lecture for some course that sucks (i.e. any of them), I came upon two semi-conscious first years lying in the gutter. The young man appeared to have had a huge penis drawn with commendably homoerotic artistry on his cheeks while the young lady, whose boob tube, hoop earrings and total lack of dignity identified her as being from Weir House seemed to be grubbing about in the gutter for something. Possibly her self-respect. As I paused, contemplating the possibility of using one or the other as an impromptu urinal, I spotted something poking out of Cockface’s bag that provoked the fucking fury in me. A copy of the world’s shittiest magazine, FHM.
FHM really fucks me off. It is seriously the most incredibly fucking retarded magazine in an indescribably backwards field. I’ve never worked out what FHM stands for (probably Fannies, Hooters and Masturbation or something equally infantile) but if there was any justice on this hellhole of a planet it would stand for Fucking Horrible Magazine. I completely fail to understand the point of a ‘lad’s magazine’. So far as I can see one acquires all of the social stigma of buying real porno without any of the fucking. Do people seriously think they look any classier buying Ralph or FHM than Asian Sex Digest Weekly? Upon closer inspection the shitasticity continues, as the articles are shit beyond belief. The letters page basically consists of their readers trying their (left) hand at erotic fiction, the stories consist of “GUYS, I HAD SEX!” and the interviews basically consist of tiny girls who can barely be 18 attempting to outdo their partner (because there’s always a partner) in inventing the most bullshit answers to ridiculously sleazy questions.
The articles are equally shitty. They consist of polls in which their readership endeavours to make the most shit up in a single reply, stories about “AWESOME NEW SEX MOVES THAT WILL BLOW HER MIND”, pictures of nowhere near naked enough girls, no matter what the context, and a general shittiness. It’s a sad place for a magazine to be when motherfucking Playboy has better articles. I would go so far as to say I would rather be caught by every female I know with a closet full of Playboys than I would be seen by my most open-minded female friend with one copy of Ralph or FHM. At least Playboy is vaguely classy. FHM has about as much class as a first-year rugby player from Christchurch drinking fifteen cans of Lion Brown and then going to Indigo and throwing up on a 22 year old art student before groping her breasts and calling her boyfriend a faggot. Not that I’m bitter or anything.
The single most shitty thing about FHM , though, isn’t the shit content, or the oafishly retarded tone, or the pictures of models I’ve never heard of with their nipples airbrushed out lest the 14 year olds who buy this so-called magazine become overcome with lust and rendered sterile after their gonads explode. No, the worst thing about FHM and its inbred pack of shit-eating cousins is the similarity they bear to another great bane of my life: Cleo, Girlfriend, Dolly and so on. Consider: both genres have dumb articles, stupid polls, a marvelously secondary school approach to sex and semi-nude pictures of supposedly attractive members of the opposite sex. That’s right guys, when you read FHM what you’re really reading is MAN-CLEO. In fact, reading Man-Cleo too often probably turns you gay.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if one was to shred Man-Cleo and ordinary Cleo and combine them. My guess is some kind of maturity black hole that sucks every last bit of adulthood out of anybody nearby and turns them into first years or God forbid, fourth formers. A cursory examination of the campus suggests this has already happened in Weir House, Eastside, the Salient offices and that toilet where some pseudo-wit drew an (inaccurate) guide to sexual diseases on the wall in Sharpie complete with giant excessively detailed rotten cocks. Don’t trust in that guide by the way – its advice for how to avoid gonorrhea does not really work very well.
In twenty years time when we look back on the Zeros and wonder why we were such faggots back then, FHM will be more to blame than MTV was to blame for the gigantic fuck-up that was the Eighties. The only thing that can be done to salvage this generation of males is to take police officers off shit jobs like homicides and station them outside bookstores to shoot everyone who even looks at an FHM or a Maxim or a Ralph or whatever in the balls with a shotgun. It sounds harsh but it’s the only way we can stop the future from being like Men Behaving Badly, only shittier and with more robots and lasers.