Confessions of a former magazine writer

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This was published 13 years ago

Confessions of a former magazine writer

At last, it is time to relieve myself of a long-lingering feeling of nausea.

RALPH, the men's magazine named after a slang term for vomiting, has spewed out its last edition. After 13 years, it has puked for the final time - on to the page anyway (Ralph will continue to spray chunks online). The demise of the magazine feels like the right time for me to bring up something myself, to belch forth a confession: I wrote for Ralph, took their money, and was offered a job.

There, I've said it. I'm not proud. I can only say - like the woman who later explains away her nude photo spread for a men's mag by insisting she was young and confused and needed the money - that I was young and confused and needed the money.

It was 2002 and I was struggling for a whatchamacallit - a career. And so I found myself in Ralph's Sydney office, being interviewed and taking a test of sorts. I don't remember the interview at all - which may be evidence of the mind repressing a traumatic memory - but I do recall something of the test. They sat me down at an empty desk before a wall of blown-up and framed Ralph covers. The semi-naked cover girls stared down at me like exam invigilators (the kind that would exist if life were a Van Halen video), and I was given mock pages of the mag and instructed to come up with headlines and captions.

Now as far as exam challenges go, this wasn't up there with explicating on Hegelian dialectics in the original. But nor was it easy, exactly. There was so little to work with. A magazine devoted to men's worst habits, that takes a kind of avenging pride in stupidity, sets narrow parameters for what is funny. After all, the content in lad mags essentially falls into just three categories. First, women and how they have breasts, legs and stuff. Secondly, beer and how bonzer it is. And thirdly, blokes and how they're slaves to categories one and two, which makes them nuts and prone to do dopey things like wrestle crocodiles, eat 40 meat pies, buy their own ape, etc.

Anyway, the great shame and worry for me is that I must have done well in the test (a life first, yay!). I was offered the job. Apparently I had the makings of a Ralph employee; I was in tune with the mag's mindset. And it was this terrifying thought that haunted me through several dark nights of the soul before I knocked the job back.

Paradoxically, I felt I didn't belong at Ralph, partly because I could have fitted in so easily. The office - whatever the fantasy image - was not full of lingerie models draped over desks demonstrating the best way to unclip a bra, defuse a bomb, escape a hostage situation, etc. There were just listless men staring at computers - men who looked a lot like me.

Lad magazines aren't staffed by the sort of knockabout lads that the mag targets, but by mildly bookish middle-class men (read, failed novelists) trying to imagine these lads who are not much like them. So the editors and writers basically play a guessing game in an atmosphere of deep cynicism and condescension. That lad mags demean women is a ''no-shit, Sherlock'' observation. But they also demean men by imagining man at his worst and then talking down to him even as they pretend he's being celebrated.

I'm not sure Ralph's target lad ever really existed, and that the buyers weren't always just 14-year-old boys who wanted to see their favourite B-grade celebrity in her smalls. But if he did exist, he was the sort of bloke who would've beaten up the kind of man who worked at the magazine.

The cover girl on the mag's final issue is Clare "chk-chk-boom" Werbeloff, a woman who found notoriety for pretending she witnessed a shoot-out between a "fatter wog" and a "skinnier wog" in Kings Cross. It's too late now, but Werbeloff would actually have made a much better addition to Ralph's editorial team than me: she could tell a "fully sick" story and make people buy it.

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