Last week's #oscar retweet. Nel: You kept a magazine in your bedside drawer? Why did you? OP: For my safety. Nel: Was it Scope or Loslyf?
A joke, but in many ways Oscar Pistorius is the archetypal lads' mag reader and until his recent mutilating whoopsie, a lad himself. He liked fast cars, bullets, Barbie blondes, fart jokes, guns and gadget porn.
Lads' mags have always had a large following in South Africa. Playboy (perhaps because it was banned) achieved cult status. In the 1970s even grandmothers read Scope.
But all over the world lads' mags are struggling. Britain's Nuts is down 30% and Zoo managed a circulation of only 40068, down 19.3%. Locally, Loslyf still exists, but with a shrunken readership. FHM will close next month.
Punters are voting with their penises and the internet offers more varied D-cup fantasies than a magazine, however laddish.
For the past few months British feminists have been campaigning against lads' mags, targeting retailers. They say that the mags, by objectifying women, spike domestic violence. They have succeeded in getting the magazines covered in modesty bags, a loony creation to keep innocent eyes away from cover lines. At the same time, they make them hidden objects of great desire.
The connection between lads' mags and domestic violence is questionable. If only there was a one-villain explanation.
There is another reason lads' mags are sinking into a sea of pulp: it is no longer mandatory for the man's man to be part of the lads' mag conspiracy. The mechanic at the garage where my car is serviced blushed when I saw a girlie magazine on his workbench.
Once the gender lines were fine, but they were drawn. Now, they are scuffed by the footprints of feminism and academia. Consequently, men themselves are bewildered.
In prosecutor Gerrie Nel's cross-examination of Pistorius, the text messages revealed a loucheness. It is not only Pistorius on trial but a prevailing attitude towards women, an attitude endorsed very often by the soft-porn laddish mags.
When former FHM features editor Max Barashenkov joked on Twitter about sterilisation and corrective rape, did he feel too macho to care? His fellow writer Montle Moorosi made further comments jokingly justifying date rape (provided that you tell her you love her first).
Both were sacked but appeared to have very little idea of the seriousness of their crime.
Even famously sophisticated British actor Stephen Fry lost face over a tweet: "If women liked sex as much as men there would be straight cruising areas."
The latest gender skirmish is between a woman called Irini Agathagelou at an Ikeys-Pukke after-match party, always dangerous ground. She went to the aid of a male friend who was being punched by an Ikey and ended up with a black eye and in need of stitches. A video shows a woman, presumed to be Agathagelou, repeatedly hitting a man on the head with a shoe. The man responds by punching her in the face.
Sympathies lie mainly with the woman. Does this not indicate that we have simply swapped the repression of women for the repression of men?
I don't believe so. I think we are slouching on the turf of transformation. As a friend says: "Men have got to learn." Perhaps the fact that lads' mags are no longer a prized asset is reason to believe attitudes are changing.
Misogyny is no longer chic. There have been too many brutal awakenings: continuing increases in incidents of rape, assaults on women, murder.
Though it was a man they killed, the Waterkloof Four revealed a more transgressive side to boykieism, far, far away from braais and wors.
Women are still foot soldiers of feminism. For most women the fight is not over, least of all for the child brides, the shack dwellers routinely raped, the desperate and downtrodden, the homeless and the mad. The Reeva Steenkamps. It is war and when we can joke about the Holocaust, we will be able to joke about female emancipation.
For the moment it is a fierce and humourless world where flippancy is not acceptable. Laddism might have shape-shifted as men turn to the internet but the bare bones of it were revealed in many of the messages between Oscar and Reeva. Most women will recognise these words: "I'm the girl who fell in love with you but I'm also the girl who gets side-stepped when you are in a shit mood."
It would be encouraging to think that if lads' mags closed menfolk would change. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was on the button when he said: "Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it."
It is too much to hope that the closing of mags signals the boykie as a dying breed. After all, the mags still have their use. A doctor at a sperm clinic told me that Loslyf, Hustler, FHM etc never fail to produce the goods.