The Surprisingly Complex Ethics of 'Lad Culture'

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It is difficult to determine whether sociologists should diagnose ‘lad culture’ as progressive or reactionary. On the one hand, the excessive pursuits of sex, drugs, and alcohol among Britain's white, working-middle-class males, as once glorified by LadBible, could be interpreted as a reaction to the asceticism prevalent in the United Kingdom since the Reformation. On the other hand, they could join their Gender Studies cousins in framing the subculture as a “sexist” and anti-intellectual rejection of the emasculation of men under feminism and the metrosexual ‘new man’. While both of these interpretations may be valid, neither attempt to answer an underlying ethical question: whether lad culture’s loutishness was a Trojan horse for a moral purpose.