Lad mags like Zoo and Nuts should be stored with the porn on the top shelves of newsagents around the world, and should have movie style age ratings applied to them so no horny fifteen year olds can get their hands on them. Or at least that's what a Home Office commissioned report says. More or less.

The report says the weekly mags are basically "soft porn at pocket-money prices", and have a role to play in the sexualisation of boys and girls at an increasingly early age. Explicit video games, too-easy-to-access internet porn and the increased use of sexual imagery in advertising are all also blamed for that phenomenon.

The report's author, Dr Linda Papadopoulos from London Metropolitan University, said at a seminar previewing the report: "It is a drip, drip effect. Look at porn stars, and look how an average girl now looks. It's seeped into every day: fake breasts, fuck-me shoes ... we are hypersexualising girls, telling them that their desirability relies on being desired. They want to please at any cost. And we are masculinising boys - many feel they can't live up to the porn ideal, sleeping with lots of women".

The report makes 36 recommendations about how to combat this here sexualisation of young people, including the aforementioned age restrictions on the sale of magazines like Zoo and Nuts. I'm pretty sure some newsagent chains already operate such a system already, but this would force all magazine sellers to comply

If ministers give the recommendation any serious consideration it remains to be seen how the publishers of Zoo and Nuts respond. In the past they have argued they are no more explicit than The Star or Daily Sport and that any rules applied to them should be applied to the red tops too.