Boobs Aren't News

It is unarguable that women’s rights have improved vastly over the past century, decade, and even singular years. Women are working, becoming more successful than could have ever have been foreseen even just fifty years ago. No longer are women simply objects to look pretty, to spend their husbands money, and to produce healthy offspring. Women are empowered and important. Women are equal.

So why is it that we still have one particular ‘celebration of natural beauty’ looming over our nation, like a repressive cloud, determined to dampen us back into the dark ages? (And most probably the stereotypical, low-budget film version of the dark ages, with helpless maidens in sheer, see-through nighties, and princess caps almost as pointy as their obviously displayed nipples.)

The Sun’s page three, as we know and ‘love’ it, first brightened up our lives, like a brilliantly nude ray of sunshine, in 1969, with ‘penthouse pet’ Ulla Lindstrom- fully clothed, but suggestively unbuttoned. Gradually from there on out, the feature became more and more common within the tabloid, and the idea of casual female nudity apparently appeared to catch on amongst other newspapers, with The Sun only spurring it on. In recent times, the newspaper has even introduced a competition in which young women can enter- sending topless pictures to the Sun’s website, which the public are then allowed to vote on, as to who should be the ‘Page 3 idol’ of that year. If the fact that many of the girls are barely over eighteen is not worrying enough, the fact that these are displayed on The Sun’s website- something which many school or security systems could fail to block due to The Sun’s status as a newspaper, should suffice.

Troublingly, the issue of the wide availability of page 3, and the inarguably damaging effects it could be having, is/are often mockingly dismissed. In 2004, labour MP Clare Short attempted to renew an already underway campaign against page 3, only to be ridiculed by the newspaper, with quotes calling her ‘fat’ and ‘jealous’, and referring to one woman’s comment- simply stating that she agreed with Short’s opinions, as ‘moaning’. Furthermore, when doing my own research on the response of The Sun to complaints, I was not only shocked, but disappointed that they neglected to reply to not one, not two, but three civil and honest emails, which may have allowed me to give perhaps a slightly less biased article in regards to the debate. It seems that now we have only editor Dominic Mohan’s quote on the subject (That it is ‘a celebration of natural beauty’) to go by. How unfortunate it must be for Mr. Mohan’s daughters to discover that beauty can only come from wearing next to nothing.

The really sad thing throughout this is that through The Sun’s blatant censorship of any other negative comments, women who are left feeling inadequate because of the newspaper feel they are alone. The story of one school girl, on the ‘every day sexism project’ online, recounts how insecurities came about when a stranger on a bus probed her for her opinion on the page 3 feature, and answered her response of “I don’t think I’m the target audience.” With a derogatory comment about her chest and how she needn’t worry because they ‘wouldn’t be asking her to model’. This displays not only The Sun’s ability to make women feel desperately insignificant, but its additional ability to give people a dangerous amount of confidence in what is appropriate to not just say to females, but in this case underage females. Often this type of behavior is dismissed as ‘banter’, which is described on the popular website Urban Dictionary, as ‘A word used to cover up what would usually be classed as completely inappropriate behavior’.

Fortunately, there comes a savior in the form of the refreshingly evenhanded Facebook page ‘No More Page 3’ created by thirty five year old, Lucy Holmes, in order to bring together the people that have signed her Change.org petition, campaigning for Mr. Mohan to ‘take the bare boobs out of The Sun’. The page provides an outlet to those people- both male and female, who find themselves more and more perturbed by the fact that in this modern day and age, what is essentially soft pornography is still allowed to be printed on a daily basis. It may not be the Sun’s intention, but the, admittedly muted, however still continued, degradation of women owes The Sun a lot of thanks. Within a post on the page, one woman recounts her young son’s response to seeing a page 3 feature on display within a shop, asking his mother if it’s ‘what girls do when they grow up’. Is this really what we as a society want? Is this what we are going to allow? Should boys grow up expecting one thing and one thing only from women? Likewise, should girls grow up thinking the only way to get a man’s attention is to ‘get them out for the lads’?

Critics of the page include Alex Sim-Wise, a former page 3 girl, who describes the views expressed on the page as ‘blinkered’. She argues that supporters of the campaign are simply ‘trying to put other women out of the job’. She additionally states, ‘they are obviously not very intelligent’. Unfortunately for Sim-Wise, this shaming only really proves her obliviousness to the nature of the page, whose only concern is that page 3 is taken from The Sun- a ‘family’ newspaper, not that the industry of glamour modeling is stopped all together. Moreover, if a woman choses only to model for one specific newspaper, inevitably she has herself to blame if she finds herself ‘out of the job’.

However, it seems for the majority, a lot of people would agree with the page, with the results of an online survey serving as evidence to this. The survey, found on elliephantintheroom.wordpress.com, questioned visitors as to whether they thought page 3 should be removed. A conclusive 100% of those that answered, agreed it should in fact, be stopped. The question now is what will be done about these opinions. Will they remain simply blind hope? Or will action be taken that hopefully, and rather wonderfully, leads to the end of The Sun’s page 3?