About Mad About Boys

Mad About Boys

Mad About Boys was a monthly magazine for young girls published in London by Planet Three Publishing, launched in January 2001 and closed after just four issues. It ran to 32 pages and cost £1.50. Its selling point, stated openly by its editor, was that each issue featured twelve teen boys aged thirteen to seventeen, with readers voting for a boy of the month. That proposition, aimed by the publisher at girls aged nine to twelve, although its own material also described the target as eleven to thirteen and young teens, triggered an immediate national controversy: Woolworths and WHSmith refused to stock it, it was condemned in a parliamentary Early Day Motion, and it was debated across BBC News, The Guardian and The Observer.

The magazine ceased publication after four issues because of poor sales. Its brevity, however, is deceptive. Mad About Boys is one of the most fully documented short-lived magazines in British publishing history, precisely because its controversy was recorded in national news coverage, in Parliament and in subsequent academic discussion, including Angela Harris's 2004 study All About the Girl. It remains the standard case study in debates about the commercialisation and sexualisation of pre-teen girls' media in Britain.

Planet Three Publishing and the Launch of January 2001

Mad About Boys was published by Planet Three Publishing in London and launched in January 2001; Magforum's list of 2001 launches records the title in February, a small discrepancy typical of launch announcements and on-sale dates. The magazine entered a competitive and lucrative market: pre-teen and young teen girls were among the most loyal magazine buyers in Britain, served by titles built around pop, fashion, posters and celebrity. Planet Three's innovation was to build a magazine for that audience around boys themselves, not as distant pop stars but as featured, votable personalities.

The format was compact: 32 pages monthly at £1.50, priced and sized for pocket-money purchase. The modest physical package underlines that the controversy was never about explicit content in the manner of adult publishing. It was about address: a magazine explicitly selling pre-teen girls a monthly selection of teenage boys to admire and vote on. Every later argument, in Parliament, in the press and in the shops that refused it, returned to that founding editorial proposition and to the ages stated for its readers and its featured boys.

Twelve Boys an Issue and a Boy of the Month

The magazine's editor described its selling point plainly: twelve teen boys aged thirteen to seventeen were featured in each issue, and readers voted for a boy of the month. Interactivity of that kind, voting, ranking and choosing favourites, was a proven engine of young readers' loyalty, borrowed from pop magazines' polls and pin-up features. Mad About Boys made it the whole concept. The boys were presented as accessible ideals, older than the readers but not adult celebrities, and the vote gave nine-to-twelve-year-old readers a sense of participation in a world of teenage romance from which their age otherwise excluded them.

That gap between reader and subject was the heart of the objection. Critics argued that the magazine imported the conventions of teen romance publishing, the crush, the pin-up, the chosen favourite, into a readership of children as young as nine, and did so with boys up to seventeen whose presentation echoed older teen titles. Defenders replied that crushes on older boys and pop stars were a normal part of pre-teen girls' culture which magazines reflected rather than created. The argument was never resolved on its merits; it was resolved by retailers and by sales figures within four issues.

Who Was the Editor? A Note on the Record

The published record of Mad About Boys contains a discrepancy that honest accounts should state rather than hide. Coverage in Wikipedia and PR Week names the editor as Maria Landolfi, and Landolfi is the editor quoted describing the magazine's selling point of twelve boys an issue. Magforum's 2001 launches list, however, names the editor as Zia Allaway. The two listings have never been publicly reconciled in the sources that document the magazine, and both names remain attached to its launch in the reference literature.

Such discrepancies are common in the history of short-lived launches, where staff changed between announcement and publication, roles overlapped, and the trade lists were compiled from early information. What is not in dispute is the editorial position the magazine defended in public: that its content was appropriate for its readers and comparable to the crush culture of existing girls' magazines. The defence was made in the editor's name in February 2001 coverage and was answered, in the same news cycle, by child welfare campaigners, parliamentarians and the two largest magazine retailers in Britain.

Woolworths and WHSmith Refuse to Stock It

The decisive commercial blow came from distribution. Woolworths and WHSmith, then the two most important high-street sellers of children's magazines in Britain, banned or refused the title amid concern about adult-style content aimed at pre-teen girls. For a pocket-money magazine, refusal by those chains was close to fatal: the shops where its readers actually bought magazines, with parents, on high streets, would not carry it. A monthly aimed at nine-to-twelve-year-olds has almost no alternative route to its audience of equivalent scale.

The refusals were reported by BBC News and The Guardian on 6 February 2001, within weeks of the launch, and they transformed a trade story into a national one. Retailer gatekeeping of this kind is a recurring, under-examined force in British magazine history: no law was passed and no regulator ruled, yet the judgement of two buying departments determined what a publisher could sell. Mad About Boys had been designed for the newsstand, and the newsstand's largest landlords declined it, leaving the magazine to seek its pre-teen readers in the scattered outlets that remained.

Condemned in Parliament: The Early Day Motion

Mad About Boys was condemned in an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons, the parliamentary device by which members register concern and invite debate. The motion cited Dr Michelle Elliott of the child welfare charity Kidscape, whose criticism gave the campaign against the magazine a recognised child-protection voice. Parliamentary condemnation of a 32-page girls' magazine was an exceptional step, reflecting how completely the title had become, within a month of launch, a symbol in a wider argument about childhood and commerce.

The Early Day Motion matters to the magazine's record because it fixed the terms of that argument in an official document: concern that adult-style content was being aimed at pre-teen girls. Whatever individual members thought of the magazine itself, the motion registered a political consensus that a boundary had been approached. For historians of childhood and media, Mad About Boys is valuable precisely because its reception generated this kind of primary evidence, parliamentary, journalistic and academic, out of all proportion to its four issues.

The Defence: Carol Sarler in The Observer

The magazine was not without defenders. The journalist Carol Sarler defended Mad About Boys in The Observer, arguing the case that the magazine reflected, rather than corrupted, its readers' existing world of crushes and playground romance. The defence articulated the liberal position in such disputes: that pre-teen girls were not blank innocents but developing people whose interests in boys were natural, that singling out one honest magazine was hypocritical when pop culture surrounded them with similar material, and that moral panic said more about adult anxieties than about children's reading.

The exchange between Kidscape's condemnation and Sarler's defence framed a debate that recurred throughout the following decade in Britain, over clothing, music, advertising and eventually social media aimed at young girls. Mad About Boys arrived at the very start of that decade, in the first weeks of 2001, and its four issues became the debate's founding exhibit. Later official and academic discussions of the sexualisation of childhood, including Harris's All About the Girl in 2004, could cite a complete, documented episode: launch, proposition, refusal, parliamentary motion, defence and closure.

Four Issues and Out

Mad About Boys ceased after four issues because of poor sales. The sequence invites a simple reading, that the public rejected it, but the record supports a compound explanation: a new magazine denied the two largest retail channels for its audience was attempting to build a monthly buying habit among nine-to-twelve-year-olds through residual outlets, while carrying the costs of a national controversy. Poor sales were the stated cause of death; the bans were the condition that made strong sales nearly impossible. Both facts belong in the magazine's history.

Four issues is a short life even by the standards of failed launches, and it meant the magazine never had the chance to adjust, to soften its proposition, reposition its age target or prove its defenders right by settling into harmless routine. It exists in the record frozen at the moment of maximum controversy, its first issue's concept still its whole story. Publishers rarely learn publicly from such episodes, but the trade absorbed the lesson: the pre-teen girls' market would be served, profitably and at length, by magazines whose romance content was framed through pop stars and fashion rather than through a monthly vote on teenage boys.

Mad About Boys as a Document of Its Moment

The afterlife of Mad About Boys is scholarly and journalistic rather than nostalgic. Nobody revives it, collects it affectionately or stages reunions of its readers; instead it is cited, in studies of girls' media such as Harris's All About the Girl, in histories of magazine publishing such as Magforum's, and in continuing arguments about marketing to children. Its documentary trail, BBC and Guardian reports of 6 February 2001, a House of Commons motion, an Observer defence, trade listings that cannot even agree on its editor, is richer than that of magazines which published for decades unexamined.

That is the paradox the title leaves behind. As a magazine, Mad About Boys was a failure: four issues, poor sales, closed within months. As evidence, it is exemplary, a small London monthly whose launch forced retailers, parliamentarians, campaigners and journalists to state, on the record and within a single month, where each believed the line lay between serving young girls as readers and exploiting them as a market. Directories of British magazines include it not for what it published, but for what its publication revealed.