Scan the magazine covers on this page and see if you can calculate the percentage of them that are geared to appeal to young men. Okay, that's a trick question. All these titles, and in fact pretty much all the general-interest teen magazines that exist, are designed with girls in mind. But hold on a sec. While it's probably fair to say that most lads won't have much use for yet another sexy poster of Ronan, you, as a boy, might want to read the story in Bliss about why so many boys commit suicide.

The various stories about what makes a "boy magnet", "capturing his heart" and "40 ways to get his attention" could be interesting, too: not only might they give you an insight into girls' behaviour, they might prove to have some helpful advice that applies to fellas, too.

In fact, there's plenty of evidence that, when a teenage boy is finished slagging his sister for reading those crap magazines, he sneaks a read of them (though he rarely has the guts to buy them himself). After all, teenagers often complain in surveys that parents and schools don't give them enough information about issues of sex and sexuality; and given that these magazines are pretty much stuffed with that sort of information, why should girls have a monopoly on it?

One of the latest efforts in Britain to create a general-interest boys' magazine failed, perhaps because it didn't understand this simple fact. Boys First was published by Christine Cubitt, a mother who was disgusted at the diet of sex and bad language in the young people's publications on the market.

So Boys First was published, from Cubitt's home in England, with no sex. Instead, there were lots of articles about boyish stuff like cars and wildlife (wildlife?). In spite of free sweets on the cover and, finally, a few slightly sexy jokes, the magazine's circulation went from bad to worse. After 10 issues, Boys First - which briefly was BFM - stopped publishing last summer.

So if teenage boys want to read about sex, do they buy the young men's magazines that are packed with "sexy birds" and sex talk - Loaded, Maxim and the like? Apparently not, retailers say. Again, someone else's copy of those magazines might merit a peek, but the whole package - full of lifestyle and consumer stories aimed at men of college-age and up - just isn't right for your average 15- or 16-year-old.

Even music magazines such as Q and NME apparently don't appeal to mid-teen readers, except the small minority with an intense special interest in music; even then, the music covered in those magazines is adult-oriented (e.g. more rock than dance). So you lads must buy something. What? Interest in comics, it seems, carries right through the teenage years. And a genre of publication that didn't exist 10 years ago now sells by the barrel-load, mostly to teenage boys: computer-games magazines. Comics and computer games: it seems boys prefer their entertainment to be a bit more removed from the real world.