I used to be on a quiz team with Michael Gove at the River Café and I don't remember him ever mentioning to me the “instant-hit hedonism” of lads' mags. The Shadow Schools Secretary is absolutely wrong in one respect and absolutely right in another in the speech he gave yesterday criticising men's magazines.

Yes, weekly tits-and-laughs titles such as Nuts and Zoo focus on cheap thrills and the assumption that women are as up for it as men. In this respect his speech is spot on. Where he veers off target is making the giant leap, without the benefit of any hard evidence, from their narrow girl-obsessed content to blaming them for the breakdown of family life. Absentee fathers were a huge problem more than a hundred years ago yet no one today would seriously blame that on the existence of Victorian penny dreadfuls.

When I launched Loaded back in 1994 we had so little naked flesh in it that compared with today's men's titles we were positively monkish. But over the years the men's magazines - like pop music, horror films, and computer games - have routinely been blamed for social decline. At one point Loaded had questions asked in Parliament about its influence over young men, but the only accusation levelled at us that rang true was when a newspaper ran a story blaming it for a sperm shortage at a Birmingham fertility clinic.

These magazines are designed to provide a weekly splash of fantasy: a world of wags, gags, lads and shags. They are irresponsible, short-term and narrow in their understanding of relationships because their purpose is to offer the reader a distraction from the stress of driving a van or fighting the Taleban. The vast majority of readers understand that what they are looking atis simply escapism: they know the difference between the women they meet and the Jordans in between the pages of Zoo.

Likewise, Mr Gove's suggestion that women's magazines are in some way more mature in their perspective on relationships and sex is ludicrous. Yes, they have fewer pin-ups, but if you put together a woman based on the editorial content of all women's magazines you would end up with a neurotic, diet-addicted shopaholic who is obsessed with her hair and paranoid that she will never get a man. Men, like women. are more than the contents of their favourite magazines.

Mr Gove's comments are designed to provoke debate - but more likely they'll increase the sales of Nuts and Zoo for a week. There is nothing like the condemnation of a Tory politician to increase your street cred.

James Brown was the founding Editor of Loaded magazine

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