the New Man has officially been laid to rest (if indeed he ever drew breath). The Nineties man knows who he is, what he wants and where he's going, and he's not afraid to say so. And yes, he still wants to get laid." In gender studies Though always principally driven by the media, the concept of the "lad" or "new lad" was widely discussed at the time as a male backlash to feminism and changing gender norms. For example, the writer Fay Weldon claimed in 1999 that, "laddishness is a response to humiliation and indignity ... the girl-power! girl-power! female triumphalism which echoes through the land". The press frequently presented the new lad in opposition to a slightly earlier media construct, the "new man," who supposedly eschewed traditionally male interests as part of his feminist values, a man who "has subjugated his masculinity in order to fulfill the needs of women .." and has a "passive and insipid image". Both the "new lad" and the "new man" were - it was always implicitly assumed - heterosexual and cisgender. Many feminists were robust in their criticism of lad culture. Naomi Wolf stated: "the stereotypes for men attentive to feminism were two: Eunuch, or Beast", in the New Statesman, Kira Cochrane argued that "it's a dark world that Loaded and the lad culture has bequeathed us". 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". An article in Frieze magazine proposed a psychoanalytic reading of the new lad phenomenon: 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". Other writers observed that social constraints simply meant that "it is easier to be a lad rather than a new man in most workplaces". Meanwhile, the lad could be seen as the ongoing reaction to a far older perceived threat from women to men's freedom, one that predated feminism: the lad image was "a refuge from the constraints and demands of marriage and nuclear family". Social studies A study by Gabrielle Ivinson of Cardiff University and Patricia Murphy of the Open University identified lad culture as a source of behavioural confusion, and an investigation by Adrienne Katz linked it