Campaigners meet with MPs to push for Tescos lads’ mags ban
Feminist campaigners are meeting with MPs today, in a bid to force supermarket chains to stop stocking copies of lads' mags featuring images of bikini-clad women.
The parliamentary meeting will be led by Green MP Caroline Lucas, alongside rights groups UK Feminista and Object.
Campaigners are using legal and political pressure to push supermarkets into banning the magazines, which they say breach equality legislation.
It comes as a survey by ITV's Daybreak revealed 45% of people believe the magazines encourage sexism.
Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman has stopped short of calling for a supermarket ban, but also hit out against the magazines, which include titles like Nuts and Loaded.
"It's possible for there to be a view and to have a campaign without being accused of banning something," she told The Agenda with Tom Bradby.
"I think that women in the 21st century can aspire to more than being sex objects for the titivation of men.
"Would you like your daughter to be on the front page of Zoo or Nuts or Loaded?
"It is a very powerful image that a woman's value increases with the lack of clothing that she's wearing. Don't accuse me of trying to ban it, I'm just against it."
The woman chosen to head the campaign, Romola Garai, was once in a photo shoot for high-end men's magazine Esquire.
"I am very aware that I have at times in my career been part of the problem and not part of the solution, and as I have got older I have tried to correct that," she said.
"But it is very difficult because I believe the media in this country is inherently sexist. And so if you do a job which involves you interacting with it, that does inevitably lead to some difficult choices, and I am sure that very often I haven't made the right choice."
The Co-op recently cancelled a move to put the magazines in a so-called 'modesty bag' and opted instead to ban them outright.
