The subculture involved heterosexual young men assuming an anti-intellectual position, shunning cultural pursuits and sensitivity in favour of drinking, sport, sex and sexism.
Principally understood at the time as a male backlash against feminism and the pro-feminist "new man", the discourse around the new lad represented some of the earliest mass public discussion of how heterosexual masculinity is constructed.
The title of a 2007 book by the gender studies academic David Nylund about USA Sports Radio, "Beer, Babes and Balls" mirrors the three stereotypical interests of the "lad.
Men Behaving Badly,[9][10] Game On and They Think It's All Over were 1990s television programmes that presented images of laddishness dominated by the male pastimes of drinking, watching football, and sex.
A 2012 National Union of Students report citing the academic John Benyon identified how "Uncensored displays of masculinity during the 1990s were deemed by those involved to be ironic by their very nature.
He [Benyon] highlights how the magazine Loaded consciously reduced working class masculinities to jokes, interest in cars and the objectification of women, and dismissed criticisms as humourless attacks on free speech which failed to see the ironic nature of the representations.
Naomi Wolf stated: "the stereotypes for men attentive to feminism were two: Eunuch, or Beast",[18] in the New Statesman, Kira Cochrane argued that "it's a dark world that Loaded and the lad culture has bequeathed us".
[19] Joanne Knowles of Liverpool John Moores University wrote that the "lad" displays "a pre-feminist and racist attitude to women as both sex objects and creatures from another species".
As a heterosexual construct, in which men become little boys with adult desires, and women become their passive but sexually available mothers, laddism is straight from the darker chapters of a psychoanalyst’s hand-book.." Other writers saw less new about the lad.
Nylund, in his 2007 "Beer, Babes and Balls" discussion of parallel developments in American popular culture, identifies "a return to hegemonic masculine values of male homosociality".
Australian lads wear a distinctive dress code, consisting of running caps and shoes combined with striped polo shirts and sports shorts.