Lad mags and popular entertainment are fascinating because in many ways they operate on the basis of radical uncertainty about the composition of their audience. The producers of programmes such as Fantasy Football League and They Think It's All Over are probably young enough to have worked in mixed environments where there is an awareness of sexual politics and 'political correctness'. Similarly, they must know that the audiences for these programmes are mixed. Yet there is no attempt to incorporate a female perspective and the terms of reference and subject matter are almost exclusively aimed at young white heterosexual males. It is difficult to determine how female members of the audience are supposed to respond to a particular brand of joke that takes women as its target and often belittles women's participation in sport.These jokes often take on a direct and lovingly sexist slant, but they do so ambiguously, with an iconoclastic sense that they are retreating to some previous (but perhaps more easy and comfortable) male identity. Classic notions of distinctions between the sexes appear to be reinforced, but it is never easy to determine to what extent parody and irony support or undermine those distinctions.

Irony of course provides the perfect opportunity for linguistic ambiguity, since you can be seen to project a particular point of view only to claim distance from, or even opposition to it. The nineties might be characterised as the decade of irony As political integrity and sincerity retreated from the realms of mass culture, we were left with 'knowing' and playful images and gestures which profited from the more populist aspects of postmodernist thought.

Postmodernism emphasises the intertextual and multi-referential aspects of cultural productions and consumers/readers/viewers are credited with increasing levels of sophistication as they find themselves viewing films, encountering advertisements, watching TV drama and light entertainment which endlessly refer to other films, ads and TV shows. Postmodern thought has been popularised to suggest that images generate a range of meanings and that the spectator plays a crucial role in creating their own individualised understanding of what they see. Perspectives such as feminism conflict with this view in their insistence that some meanings - particularly those attached to representations of women - are entrenched in the images because of visual conventions which are tried, trusted and repeated endlessly To take an example, we instantly recognise the Page 3 pose because it has become so inscribed in our consciousness through repetition. Any play on or manipulation of such a pose will therefore have resonances of its original context. Critics would argue that the pose can be used ironically playfully and can even deconstruct the original meanings of the image, therefore generating completely new inflections on an old standard. Feminism is accused of seeking univocality in its unfashionable obsession with meaning and interpretation in a quest to eradicate sexist images. Because of this, feminism becomes regarded as oppressive to ordinary people who don't want to feel patronised by someone else telling them what the advertisements, their magazines, their favourite TV programmes are 'really' saying.

But the new irony makes it difficult to object to anything potentially offensive, as was seen in the case of complaints against two recent television advertisements for Scalextric and Nintendo. The Scalextric advertisement featured a father in a maternity ward telling a newborn child about the joys of Scalextric when he is interrupted by a nurse telling him to put the boy down and play with his own daughter. The slogan 'Scalextric. It's a boy thing' is astonishing in its bald chauvinism, rivalled only by Nintendo's 'Willst thou get the girl?.., or play like one?' used to market the game 'Zelda'. More astonishing by far is the Independent Television Commission's response that 'such tongue in cheek treatments were unlikely to have the widespread negative effect that those who complained feared' ,14 putting the burden of proof on the recipient of the message rather than recognising its clear and baldly stated intentions.

Women are, of course, accustomed to these kinds of pronouncements, where unless offence can be 'proved' in some nebulous way it is assumed that such messages are harmless and not to be taken seriously The problem is that possible effects are infinitesimal when taken as isolated examples, but potentially explosive if one could measure the cumulative effect of such advertising added to women's experience of sexism and inequality in our culture as a whole.