Lads' mags have 6 weeks to "cover up": your reaction, please!

I think this is brilliant news. Co-op are completely entitled to refuse to sell items that don't match with their corporate ethics. The fact that they're listening to what a large number of people want, and that they're not afraid to put their money where their mouth is makes me much more likely to shop there. (Just have to find out where my local Co-op is!)
And anyway; they're not necessarily refusing to sell these lads' mags; just refusing to sell them if they're displaying images deemed unsuitable for display around children. I'm completely in favour of this compromise. The bonus is that it's challenging the normalisation of treating women like sexual objects. Nothing bad about that!

Actually in our little local Tesco I turn the mags over if the front covers are particularly offensive. Generally it's an aftershave advert on the back, much less revolting.

This is a fantastic step in the right direction- thank you, Co-op, for listening and not simply blathering on about consumer choice. It's a big deal for a major retailer to finally say that having this kind of imagery everywhere is not acceptable.

Hopefully this will just be the beginning and we'll see women being presented less as sex objects and more as actual human beings.

Agree with all the above.

Of course it is a complete no-brainer. Allow them to be sold without inflicting the images on the vast majority of shoppers who would rather not see a thonged backside thrust in their face when popping out for bread and milk.

The fact that our children have been subjected to these images for so long is really shameful but I think the images have become progressively worse over the years and it has crept up on all of us.

Huge cheer for step in the right direction. Now we just need the rest of the retailers to get on board.

Well done Co-op!

Excellent move, well done coop.
The front covers are revolting.

(I think that the Co-op has already "denied me the freedom" to buy battery eggs and other welfare-compromised animal products, as well as some non-fair-trade products, so I don't see any crashingly awful new threat to hiuman freedom involved in denying me the right to buy the humiliation and objectification of women from them.)

It's a very good development. But as soon as you see a shop taking seriously the awfulness of these publications, it makes you realise that covering them up is an odd sort of half-way house. Now we have seen a company recognise that a product is so awful it doesn't want its staff and most of its customers to even glimpse it, it seems more unquestionably bizarre and wrongful to stock the thing at all.

So I think and hope this will lead to a revolution of rising expectations: once its covered, we should step up the pressure and get it gone altogther.

I'm in favour of it. I hate these mags with a passion. In my local shop that mags are all at children's eye level, the shelves are only about four feet high, so its particularly horrible to see them sat there just a few inches from the My Little Pony magazines etc.

I think its a good move.

It gets them out of sight of kids - not just toddlers but older kids too - I dont' really want my 14 yr old DD seeing these on a rack.

Despite the huffing of the former editor of Front (and no doubt others) its nothing like censorship. I don't know but I'd guess that these publications can give the content information from the cover on-line somewhere.

I understand the POV that these mags should be entirely banned but I don't think that's going to happen any time soon so this is a pragmatic solution. Hopefully where the Co-op leads, other retailers will follow.

I think we should cover all magazines that show naked flesh not just lads mags but some women's magazines doing "art" covers and the mens health magazines then it's fair blanket rule and my children are not exposed to this kind of sexualisation

I support the principle just wish our society wasn't so obsessed with using sex to sell

And I don't believe covering them amounts to censorship. Censorship would be if they and any publication like this were banned altogether. Covering them enables those that want to buy this awful stuff to continue to whilst protecting children from growing up seeing images like this and growing up thinking this is something that they must aspire to and/or find attractive.

I think it's excellent. You can't stop stocking them unfortunately because people buy the sodding things, but I hate seeing them when out shopping with my 3 year old DS especially as they are often at his eye level. Sometimes they are quite explicit thank goodness he can't read yet!

I don't want him to grow up and think that the women on the covers are the norm and something to aspire to in a girlfriend so the less he sees of this at such a young age the better.