This weekend the Lose the Lads' mags campaign will stage a day of action at Tesco, but these women are fighting the wrong battle, argues Emma Barnett.

What are you up to this Saturday? It’s the start of the bank holiday so you may be away, down the pub for first orders or perhaps the Londoners amongst you, are getting ready for the Notting Hill Carnival. 

Regardless of where or what you find yourself doing – I can bet that many of you will be capturing each moment via your smartphone and the organised, will be uploading said images on Facebook and the like. 

If you slip a few photos of you in there doing the obligatory chin down, heavily-styled smile, you would be forgiven. The perfect ‘selfie’ has become totally normal in today’s snap happy world. And the art of making your selfie as gorgeous as possible – in your own mind’s eye – is now accepted as just how we capture ourselves ‘having fun’ web 3.0 style. 

Both sexes are at it – but women are definitely (via my straw poll of around 400 Facebook ‘friends’) more into producing ‘stunning’ and ‘sexy’ selfies of themselves while they are sharing the moment.

In fact, as they can control the camera, the pose and what they are wearing – they, like many female celebrities, are upping the game in what they decide to share. 

I’ve seen pics of some girlfriends on Facebook and Twitter wearing less than I’ve seen them sport in real life. 

The reason I ask what you are doing on August 24, is because it’s the next planned day of action in the Lose the Lads’ mags campaign – set up by Kat Banyard, the founder and leader of UK Feminista and Object. 

Having successfully convinced Co-op to put lads’ mags in modesty bags last month, the two feminist groups are now taking on Tesco. They want the UK’s biggest retailer in a “best case scenario” to stop selling the offending titles altogether, Baynard told The Times. 

Now we at Telegraph Wonder Women have written before about how confusing we find this campaign – and also how patronising it is in its approach. 

While women’s glossies remain in full view, sporting famous ladies in a state of undress and promising weight loss regimes that sound criminal, lads’ mags will be censored or even banned? 

But moving away from printed media, this campaign has totally overlooked the internet and the far bigger impact female celebrities posting risqué selfies has on young girls and boys. Just check out Rihanna's daily photos on Instagram. 

The forward-facing camera on smartphones has led to millions of women objectifying themselves, for their own and others’ pleasure, on a minute-by-minute basis. It’s practically become a national pastime. Why just play Scrabble on a rainy bank holiday weekend, when you can do so while posting selfies on Facebook – wearing a sexy pout and not much else? 

I get Banyard’s concerns about lads’ mags being on sale two aisles down from the fruit and veg. I understand her’s and others’ worries about these publications sending out the message that it is normal and acceptable to treat women as sex objects – but what about when women do it to themselves? 

Seren Haf Gibson, a former glamour model, makes this very point in today’s Times. Like many lads’ mags models, she found posing empowering and freeing. This is an argument many feminists in Banyard’s mould find difficult to digest. 

Just as she found posing nude a positive experience – millions of girls around the world are getting a similar buzz from objectifying themselves to their social media chums. Every ‘like’, share and comment feeds the need to share more and more images of themselves looking ‘perfect’ and ‘hot’.

And for every girl managing to perfect their look in a selfie, there are 10 others just silently looking at these albums of styled perfection feeling worse and worse about themselves. 

Girls today don’t need lads’ mags to pose sexily in front of millions of people. They just need a smartphone, social media account and some wifi. Modesty bags don’t work on the internet. Nor does censorship. 

The internet is the real battleground, not Tesco.

Photo Source: Rihanna's Instagram Photos

Source: Telegraph