picture from Living On A Slippery Slope

So the time has finally come to remove the Page 3 girl from The Sun after 40 years and I’m still not entirely sure whom this is a victory for. As I wrote in this previous blog in defence of breasts, it was a little weird to have a woman displaying her boobs as you open a newspaper (ignoring the very loose reference to The Sun as a newspaper), but for a generation it was taken as part of everyday life – assuming you read the paper, otherwise it wasn’t a part of everyday life.

What has transpired today is that Page 3 girls and indeed models in general who make a lot of money for themselves by taking their tops off, enjoy it and do it by choice. A lot of the complaints on social media inevitably came from laddish, tit obsessed men who have probably never had a real girlfriend before and as such have to rely on a printed picture every day because unfortunately there isn’t some huge network of images of naked women stored somewhere that you can access on a computer. More complaints came from the models themselves to the effect that they should be allowed to do what they like with their bodies. Another fine point but it isn’t as if Page 3 was the only outlet for this sort of thing. If you don’t have access to a real-life woman and need to look at photographs of women naked from the waist up (or down) then there are plenty of opportunities to do so and the same rule applies to the women who wish to disrobe for money.

The No More Page 3 movement are still a bit of a mystery to be honest, having still not answered my question about whether this is just about newspapers or if in fact they are going to continue their crusade until our wives and girlfriends wear a swimming costume in the shower to protect our eyes from the sight of their bare flesh. I would also note that it is still seen as acceptable to have an obviously physically gifted man parading around shirtless for the eye-pleasing of a group of women in the Diet Coke adverts. We could reach a compromise in which a less attractive man is used (in this and other campaigns) and in return a handful of fat, ugly, or hairy women could be added to the Page 3 Rota.

It has been pointed out that The Sun has replaced Page 3 with something worse, intrusive paparazzi pictures of young soap actresses on the beach in bikinis. On the surface this doesn’t look like much of a difference until you remember that Page 3 girls are paid handsomely for their pictures, and if you’ve got it then why not make as much as you can from it – after all, perky boobs are not for life. Sneaky pictures of someone on holiday, whether in a swimsuit or birthday suit, are the intellectual property of the person who was holding the camera at the time and there is nothing that the person in the photograph can do about it. Obviously if the picture is much sought after, for example someone who isn’t known for flashing the flesh, then the price will go up. Nobody can think that this is a fairer system than a woman over the age of consent allowing her breasts to be seen in return for an honest cheque, can they?

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