What is Sainsbury's policy on modesty for magazines?

Apparently the picture on the right from last month's Attitude is too racy for customers of Sainsbury's customers to view as they browse their magazine stands.

Bear this in mind next time you walk in past a poster advertising Tu's swimwear collection as you walk through the door, or maybe a biography of Tom Daley being advertised right at the entrance (like the last one was). In both those occasions in recent years Sainsbury's has a bare chested man on display prominently as you entered the store not tucked away in the magazine racks. In the case of Tom Daley of course at the time he had yet to come out as being in a same-sex relationship, unlike Robbie Rogers pictured here, but he was wearing even skimpier swimwear than the footballer is wearing in this picture.

In fact there is nothing in this picture that anybody wouldn't expect to see at the beach, swimming pool or even in the park (maybe on the street) when the summer finally arrives here in the UK. Men in shorts and topless, often sunburnt, is a sure sign that the sun has actually made an appearance across this country.

The reason I am bringing this up is that I stumbled across this post from a female Twitter user in Manchester. You know the gay capital of Northern England. She took the following picture:

Yeah just to the left where you see the stop of Robbie's eyes and quiff you will see Carmen Electra on the cover of FHM magazine. She is not wearing swimwear, that is lingerie that she is wearing, and that is a push up bra accentuating her bosom. Is there double standards at play here?



What Carmen Electra is wearing is not something that women would typically be seen wearing as outerwear. Yet somehow this particular store did not find it necessary to protect her modesty.

Sainsbury's did replay to the original poster with a reply spanning two tweets:

Hi, we use modesty covers for a range of publications – including Loaded, Zoo, Nuts, Bizarre, Front & Attitude. We do regularly review the titles covered and we’ll look into this. Thanks

Do Sainsbury's also cover up Men's Health or other sports magazines_{see update below} should they display a topless man? You know I reckon they don't.

This month's Attidude comes in its own modesty pouch, it is one of their naked issues, so the choice of five cover stars¹ are all nude. But even then the cover is somewhat self censoring and the cover is to prevent people scanning through the issue looking for the actual nude pictures more than anything else. This is a policy that both Attitude and GT follow wherever they have one of their raunchier cover shoots, they self censor, yet somehow these gay lifestyle publications with their self censoring policy get further censored by supermarkets.

Indeed my local Asda appears to have stopped stocking these two publications, I do wonder if this is down to over zealous DUP (maybe even defected to UKIP) councillors over the proximity of this store to a number of schools, as well as the train station. The net effect is that about £10 of business a month from my wallet leaves the town centre and is most often² spent in Belfast instead, so well done for those who got these titles removed from Bangor's Asda and giving my trade to another part of Northern Ireland altogether.

Update: There is an update to this particular stores position. There is now a hastily made modesty cover over FHM. But as this angle shows Men's Fitness which has a far more bulked up topless male model on the front cover this month was not while Robbie Rogers was. It does therefore appear that there is one rule for the straights and that Sainsbury's haven't got a clue of how offensive they are being in this. For a start Attitude should not have been covered up for the cover at the top, but the fact that Men's Fitness that give a far more unrealistic male body image every month through its topless cover models remains uncovered is ridiculous considering the action this particular store has been taking.

¹Yes I did choose the one with a Strictly Come Dancing winner especially for Caron Lindsay. ²On other occasions I do make the short walk to my local Sainsbury's from home, where these titles are not covered!

Men and body image

Last night and on quite late at 11pm there was a programme on Channel 4 presented by The Last Leg's Alex Brooker in which he sought to gain his perfect body in just 8 weeks.

It was a look at the male perception of body image and how in the past 20 years of so men have become as obsessed, if not more so, than women to achieve the perfect body as sold to them to the media. It appears that a lot of men, and male adolescents actually are unhappy with the shape they are in.

The programme if you haven't seen it is available on 4OD for the next month and raises serious questions about men and how they perceive their bodies; gay or straight.

Confession time:

Am I 100% happy with my body? The answer to that is no.

Would I like to improve it? The answer would be yes.

Would I go to any ends to achieve this, plastic surgery or extreme dieting. The answer there would be no. But there is reasons for my answers to all of the above.

In my late teens and early twenties my body mass index would actually have measured me as being on the verge of being underweight. Not because I was starving myself, far from it I had a healthy diet and appetite. But I was burning all that food off by being a long distance runner with a training regime to match. Now of course I'm not running 45-60 miles a week during the winter months, nor am I capable of running 10ks in 30 to 33minutes.

However, I do know that even I have let my weight slide a little bit more than even I would like. My body mass index is slap bang in the middle ground of being normal weight, but I know there are bits of me that carry the weight more than others. My arms and legs almost look like they did when I was in my prime, there is no or little excess weight there. Instead all the extra is located on torso especially my waist line. Last summer for the first time since I was 15 I had to buy trousers that didn't have a 32 inch waist. For me that was devastating. I had been a regular 32/32 trouser measurement for all of my adult life and suddenly the stockpile of trousers didn't fit me.And as a result some of my suit combos were no longer wearable.

That was one of the reasons I set myself the target to get back into running. I knew I wouldn't scale the heights of my twenty year younger self, but I wanted to achieve the one goal I had yet to do and that was to run a full marathon. So I set about getting back into running and it was tough, tougher than I ever remember it in the past. At the start I just couldn't do it. My brain was telling me I should be better than this but my body kept saying no.

Does that mean I have body image issues? Maybe in a bit but I am realistic that the me that smiles out of photographs on from Malta, Spain, USSR or Orlando is not the goal. I know that is unachievable without having to give up way too much. But carrying a little less of the flab is what I want to do for the sake of my health. You see I am heading to that milestone in the Glenn male line five-o. As my father used to say getting past that line for him every year was a bonus, he picked up only 14 of them though. I want to give myself as much chance of getting there and beyond.

However, the question I have to ask myself, is did my 20 year old self look at himself and think he was too fat? In a way he did, a little less weight to carry around the track might have improved my times, I would have to have worked out how I could have done it and still kept the strength. But I do remember at times (especially when I was out with injury) thinking that I was getting too heavy when I clearly wasn't. The pressure didn't so much come from others back then, it just came from my perfect image of me.