Campaign calls for end to Sun’s Page 3
17 Nov 2012
Today is exactly 42 years since topless women first appeared in The Sun. To mark the occasion campaigners have organised protests around the UK and hope to gather support for a No More Page 3 petition
Demonstrations taking place today include a British Institutions Fancy Dress Tea Party outside Sun HQ in London and a musical protest in Birmingham. No More Page 3 campaigners will also be collecting signatures for an ongoing petition, also available to sign online at change.org.
The petition calls upon the Sun’s editor, Dominic Mohan to “take the bare boobs out of The Sun,” and aims to get the backing of one million people. At the time of writing, more than 56,000 people have signed up to support the campaign.
Campaign founder Lucy Holmes, believes that the naked breasts of young women shouldn’t be shown in a widely read ‘family’ newspaper. In a YouTube video promoting the campaign, she explains how Page 3 contributed to her body insecurities while growing up.
“I’d look at these pictures of breasts and I just felt so ashamed of my own breasts and I thought, ‘I don’t look like these women, I’m a freak’,” she said.
The petition, addressed directly to Mr Mohan, states: “George Alagiah doesn’t say, ‘And now let’s look at Courtney, 21, from Warrington’s bare breasts,’ in the middle of the 6 o’Clock News’ does he Dominic? There would be an outcry. Consider this a long overdue outcry. Dominic, stop showing topless pictures of young women in Britain’s most widely read newspaper, stop conditioning your readers to view women as sex objects.”
Gary Miller from Faversham commented on the petition website: “This is the 21st century. We don’t need an easy route into pornography for our kids. How are women meant to be taken seriously in the workplace when this is how they are seen? It’s degrading to them.”
The Page 3 feature first appeared in The Sun in 1970 and has run regularly ever since.
The petition is supported by several well-known celebrities including comedian Jennifer Saunders, presenter Lauren Laverne and former Labour politician Alastair Campbell.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider making a donation
Donating helps us keep reporting on positive news
I couldn’t imagine that such a prudish campaign, moved by the most retrograde urges, would have been supported by Positive News. Very disappointed.
WHAT!!! Prudish?? Who are you? I cant believe that someone who frequents this site would have an opinion like yours. This campaign is about saying NO to the continuing treatment of women as sex objects — pieces of meat to be drooled over for the gratification of small minded, sexist mysoginists who’s real aim is to control women by debasing them. These airbrushed, supposedly ‘perfect’ images of women in the mainstream media are teaching people that they have to look a certain way in order to be loved and valued. I would feel exactly the same way if men were regularly portrayed with their penises on show — however that doesnt seem to happen does it? Go figure!
Ettore — if that is your real name — demanding that women not be portrayed as sex objects is not prudish.
Page 3 is the shame of this nation. Imagine showing guests from overseas around. Would you show them a copy of the Sun and say, “But here, look. This is page 3. This is what makes us truly British” ?
Dear Andrew,
I’m not sure why you are doubting the veracity of the name that appears in my post. It is not my habit to give false credentials, and I trust it is not yours either.
If your point is that women are more that a pair of boobs, you don’t really have to convince me of that. On the other side, however, there is the free will of women who:
(1) are in age to chose what they want to do with their body;
(2) do not perceive posing topless in front of a camera as something undermining their dignity (and I believe this is because they know themselves to be more that their breasts).
I believe that if a woman feels threatened by Sun’s page 3 (of which I was even unaware until a read this article) it is because she herself is doubtful about her own value. This may sound paradoxical but if you are confident in the worth and depth of what you are, in all its dimensions, why someone else’s breasts should disturb you at the length of setting up such a campaign?
Also, if the campaign is meant to spread awareness about the deeper meaning of being a women, then you may want to start your campaign amongst those same women who chose to be portrayed in Sun’s page 3 in the first place. I’m sure, however, that you will be positively surprised in discovering that they have a much higher sense of their value than you can imagine.
In faith,
Ettore
how is this positive news? Boobs are great and most of us love looking at them. In fact I plan on looking at my partner’s in a few minutes.
It seems a little odd that we all cry for freedon of action, speech and publication until someone publishes something we don’t like. What other people choose to look at , say, write or expose is no-one’s business but their own.
If this page 3 is “the shame of our nation” then I think we can even more certain that we Brits really are the pinnacle of civilisation.
Positive news, please don’t waste any more soy based ink on this ridiculous campaign. In fact you should think about starting a page 3 of your own. I volunteer to be your first model.
Agree! :-)
I agree with Ettore and Nigel, although the only argument is that such a widespread available newspaper should promote more smart stuff for the ignorant mass… Apart from that, this is just a frustrated women campaign
Interesting discussion!
As a man, I’m happy to ‘show my tits’ anyday, especially if I were to get paid for it… However, it all depends on HOW it’s done and why. Possibly comparable to the discussion regarding ‘the N word’ used in relation to those people who are darker than pink. If used between people in equality, humor and freindship, the N word is (I feel) ok. However, if it is ridiculing and derogatory or just unclear, then it’s not ok. Page 3 is neither black or white, it’s not a simple discussion which should be polarised like this. Positive news could possibly go a little more into detail… but the article would then lose it’s tabloid flavour…
Tricky ;) ?
Do as I do, never buy The Sun, buy The Morning Star.
Dear all opposers to the campain,
It seems that most of you are men. It should not be up to a man to decide what is and what isn’t acceptable in regards to the female body. The campaign is stating that page three makes some women uncomfortable — not that it’s a crime to have a look at mammary glands.
If the halting of nearly naked pictures in a national newspaper will help some women to feel comfortable in their bodies then it should definitely be removed from publication with rejoice. We live in an age where so many people feel uncomfortable in their own skin — so the beginnings of a retaliation to an unnecessary image for the ambition of helping some to feel better about themselves, well that’s positive news to me.
Shanna
Hi,
I have to point out that these women were not forced by any man to pose topless and make an exceptionally lucrative career out of it. So it is these women themselves calling the shots, not the men, as you suggest. Likewise no woman is forced to buy or read these papers. Likewise if a woman is unhappy that her partner enjoys a quick look at page 3, then she is free to leave him. That is the beauty of the freedom we have.
Surely a more worthwhile campaign would address situations where women are actually really being forced to live with adverse and/or degrading conditions. I have to agree that the situation does seem a tad trivial compared to all the other horrendous s#%*e that is going on in the world today!
Dear Shanna,
you says that “it is not up to a man to decide what is and what isn’t acceptable in regards to the female body”. I agree wholeheartedly. Nonetheless you seem to forget that those who choose to be portrayed topless are women exerting their free will.
Also, banishing someone else’s body from the sight of people in order to feel more comfortable in one own skin is hardly a positive news to me. An argument that is often used to back this campaign is that too good looking female bodies can make other women feel uncomfortable with respect to their own body shape, and that showing naked breasts is an attempt to devalue women as such. Quoting from the article, campaign founder Lucy Holmes says: “I’d look at these pictures of breasts and I just felt so ashamed of my own breasts and I thought, ‘I don’t look like these women, I’m a freak’.”
Now, if a woman feels uncomfortable because of the perceived “better looking breasts” of someone else, I suspect this person is not putting too much of her own value out of her bra. Why should she feel devalued if her “value yardstick” was not used just to compare boobs sizes?
Paradoxically we end up with a campaign that on one hand stands up to allegedly defends the “value of women beyond their breasts” and on the other hand is promoted by women who appear to lack it most.
ETtore
ETtore, I am a size 10 and a G cup and I find the page 3 highly offensive. Don’t use the excuse that it’s ‘lacking’ women who are against porn, thank you.
Really, does anyone find Page 3 sexually exciting? I think most men much prefer the real thing, and I don’t think they particularly care how far the boobs have sagged. A boob’s a boob girls. I don’t imagine there are many men out there who are turned on by Page 3. It simply isn’t that erotic– it’s just silly fun.
Page 3 is nice to look at in the same way that George Clooney or Brad Pitt are nice to look at. Or the Statue of Venus. Or any of the other millions of pieces of art which feature the human form in on stage of undress of another. That’s not to say, of course, that Page 3 rates as art!
Perhaps we should banish all beautiful people from public life, so that the rest of ugly mugs don’t have to feel inadequate. Could it be that people who feel all inadequate because some 19 year old has perkier boobs than them are actually more body obsessed than is healthy? I’m an ugly git, to be frank, and my staggeringly beautiful girlfriend and mother of my inexplicably cute baby still seems to love me. Perhaps it’s my shallowness that attracts her to me.
The second sentence of your last paragraph depict pretty much my point. It goes without saying that I agree with all the rest as well, except when you depict yourself as shallow which I don’t believe you are :-)
Dear people,
The opposition seems to basically follow the point (correct me if I’m wrong) that the real problem with society is that women hold themselves up to these “beautiful” women and find themselves lacking. Therefore, they are devaluing themselves when they should be celebrating their bodies! Look at all these emancipated women who are comfortable enough in their own skin to plaster their naked picture all over page three, of their own free will. You go girls.
But why do these women choose to do this? Why is there a culture of people supporting naked women when men remained respectably fully clothed?
Women have become the object of the “male gaze” – a commodity to be bought in a newspaper and stared at like an object. What are these women to the readers of the Sun? Pieces of flesh to feast their eyes on.
A culture that wants women to get their tits out for an audience does not award value to the women who do so. It devalues them AS A HUMAN BEING. And this is the main thing here – we need to stop thinking of men and women as separate camps to be treated differently. We should see human beings, not boobs and sexual organs. Treating a person as an object is not treating them as a human being.
By no means am I setting out to vilify men here. It’s a ridiculous thing to do, as if men can all be summed up as a group of drooling gonzos who only think with their penises (and aren’t you making an assumption here that all men are heterosexual and find boobs a turn on?). Idiots think along the same lines. You’ll see many “feminists” trying to support women, but being just as guilty of sexism as the sexist men they are trying to fight against. Men are individuals too and you can’t group them all together by their genitalia.
What I think the opposition is underestimating is the culture of objectifying women and the negative effect that perpetuates throughout society on a subtle level. If, through advertisements and the media, you constantly shed a positive light on certain bodies, you are bound to make those who don’t meet these ridiculous moulds feel insecure. Especially when all you see on TV or billboards are size 6 models or Hollywood babes. A society whose role models (pop stars, tv presenters, celebrities…) subscribe to this body image make for many women who are dissatisfied and sickened with their own forms.
They may think, on some subtle level, that to be loved or found attractive, they have to look like that. You only need to take a look around you to see the effect the media has on body image for women. And it ain’t positive.
Anorexia is one often lethal outcome of this kind of society and to take it lightly is pretty horrendous.
Dear Ava,
thank you for elaborating your thoughts so thoroughly. This pushed me to give a further thought to the whole subject, although I remain convinced of my points.
In all the arguments that are pushed forward by people supporting this kind of campaigns there is the underlying concept (some times stated explicitly, sometimes in disguise of other reasons) that showing one’s own body is something devaluing those who choose to do so. Personally I don’t think there is anything blameworthy in showing our body and its beauty, nor in admiring it. Do I mean by this that we are only boobs, penis, buttocks and so on? Obviously not. We DO have a physicality though, a bodily domain which appeals to us (men and women of any sexual orientation) with all its charge of sensual fascination. Indulging in such fascination does not imply that the value of the whole human being is diminished. That would be like saying that we devalue the worth of a sport champion as human being only because we are interested in his/her athletic performances. Our being human is made of many different things, many facets that we show, hide and use depending on the context. An athlete is not just muscles, a model is not just boobs, a programmer is not just spectacles and PC, etc.
Regarding the fact that there is a general idea of what a beautiful body looks like, well there always have been one, in any era and culture. These standards of beauty have also been very different across history (and can still be quite different across the globe).
Said that, there is a point that I do agree on, and it is a pretty big one. Media not only preferentially show the current standard of beauty but also try to dictate what is aesthetically ACCEPTABLE and what is not. This is an issue I do recon (although I think there is a shared responsibility of men and women here). Whenever there is an attempt to make everyone alike there is a big danger for society to slip in a sort of cultural totalitarianism. This is always something reprehensible, mainly when our being alike is about what we are supposed to think (not only how we are supposed to look).
The cure to any attempt to standardise people, however, never lies in censoring those who we disagree with, but rather in creating new means through which different voices can be expressed and heard. In our specific case, this would translate into promoting alternative ideas of beauty and, why not, giving room to all those “non-perfect” bodies (both male and female) that are happy and proud to be portrayed the way they are. Such a campaign would have my total support.
Kind regards,
ETtore
Dear ETtore,
I think we agree that there is a harmful exclusivity in the media of what is beautiful. Do we see the vast majority of bodies (in all their shapes and sizes) lauded as beautiful? No. Just a very exclusive minority.
And while I don’t think that wanting to appear sexual is somehow devaluing to any human being, be it women or men, creating a world where women are SEEN TO BE SEXUAL OBJECTS and little anything else, promotes this “come f**k me” mentality where women are the passive receptacles of anyone who desires them.
My problem is that if women are generally only represented AS sexual objects in the media, that this filters down to the treatment of women in general. And I don’t think your argument holds up to scrutiny when you say “a model is not just boobs” and form a part of the opposition in this discussion.
The point is that these pictures are reducing women down to just boobs. Clearly, these women have thoughts and feelings, like any human being, but this is just a blatant instance of reducing a female down to the status of a sexual object.
Express your sensuality and sexuality by all means…but this is just tissue-fodder, which seems to me to be objectification and a disregard of that person’s human status.
Sure, every culture has it’s model of beauty. There will always be people that society considers “beautiful” or “ugly,” but you’re comparing previous centuries (without the insane media control and technology that we have now) to this age…and I don’t think you can make that comparison.
Best wishes,
Ava
P.S. haha sorry about the previous essay.
Hi Ava!
Don’t worry about the assay :-) I actually liked to read it (although I disagree with most of its points…)
When I say “a model is not just boobs” I mean that the fact of being portrayed bear-chest does not diminish her to those extra centimeters of skin she chooses to show. Nor a sport magazine devalues Wayne Rooney as a human being, or diminishes him to his right kick, because it only focuses on his ability to score.
Regarding the other point, for which we seem to have some degree of common understanding, we do propose opposite recipes for the cure. I think that in order to counteract standardization one has to show more (ideas, opinions, words… and bodies), not less.
Nigel got it right when he proposed, maybe half joking, to create a sort of page 3 for Positive News. Happily “non-perfect” men and women, at ease in their skin, proud of their body and not ashamed of it, would make an amazing, unconventional and mind-opening page 3 counterpart.
Kind regards,
ETtore
Basically, this Page 3 image reduces women to sex objects, sub human, a pair of breasts. It is offensive, degrading to women and should end. How many men who defend this would wish to see their own relatives posing in these pictures? What if the papers chose to feature completely naked women, or completely naked men for that matter? These pictures have no place in newspapers and have fuelled sexism, rape and domestic violence. The message is that women are sex objects, and basically stupid because all this woman can do for a living is be photographed practically naked with a grin on her face. This does not represent the millions of women who contribute to society on equal terms with men. To deny this is to say that the propaganda against the Jews did not create the climate for the Holocaust. As shown in the Object report, it is not just the images, but the complete sexualisation and objectification in the content of these photos. If men and women are regarded as equals in society, then there should not be images in newspapers which show women as lesser than men.
I am female with no negative issues about my body. A lot of these page 3 women are very beautiful, but do I want their semi naked bodies in a newspaper? NO THANK YOU — let’s keep newspapers for news and Porn and pictures of people that want to show off their naked bodies on the top shelf. Why should it be mainstream? For children to wonder why these women are exposing themselves? Lets all grow up and lead others to a healthier mode of living.
http://gotopless.org/
How depressing to check out the Positive News website for the first time and find this kind of debate going on in the 21st century. It is beyond me how an apparently intelligent and articulate person like Ettore can square his views with any kind of interest in Positive News. He clearly either has no insight and self-awareness or is a clever dissembler. The world of the Sun newspaper and its ilk generally, page 3 in particular, and Etorre’s kind of attitude are rooted in our patriarchal, highly sexualised, consumer-capitalist system; exactly the kind of system which Positive News is trying to counter. Etorre has a very simplistic idea of “free will”. The women models who pose for page 3 are no doubt paid handsomely. They and the newspaper’s readers all suffer from high degrees of false consciousness. Both the models and the readers are being exploited, not only to sell this consumer-capitalist media outlet but more broadly to buy into the whole economic and power system that underlies it. How naive of Etorre to suggest that page 3 is not sexually titillating; of course it is, otherwise why would the Sun need to include it to attract buyers? Etorre knows this full well; would not these models be arrested for indecency if they appeared this way in public? (The “gotopless” campaign he directs us to is just a larger example of false consciousness). Page 3 is not just a bit of “silly fun”; it is the tip of the pornography iceberg. This is not fine art; it is sexually provocative pornography, which degrades women on a daily basis. Such images pervade the world of the media and advertising, becoming normalised in the minds of readers and viewers, including young children. Feminism started off well in the 1960s and 70s but sadly has now been sidelined by the overwhelming powers of capitalism. All power to Lucy’s campaign! I am tempted to suggest that Ettore and his supporters find a more suitable outlet for their corrupted views…but really it would be better for them to ditch the Sun and to carry on reading Positive News; perhaps they’ll see the light one day.
Lets go back to Victorian values, I get upset to see men topless and in tight swimming costumes. It should be against the law to see the topless men on TV swimming in the Olympics .At the same time let us remove all Greek and Roman statues from our Museum
s.
;-)