Over recent years, the
No More Page 3 campaign has gone from strength to strength, gaining support
from everyone from women’s groups to MPs. They petition the Sun’s editors to
remove the “bare boobs” from the newspaper, arguing that the presence of a naked glamour model on page 3 demeans and
objectifies women. What’s more, they are winning. Public opinion is shifting
and one title, the Irish edition of the Sun, has even relented, putting clothes
on its previously naked models.
So that’s the case
closed; bare boobs are bad, clothed ones are good, agreed? Somehow, this
attitude doesn’t feel quite right. Lucy-Anne Holmes, the campaign’s founder,
says that for her, the light bulb moment came in the summer of 2012 when the largest
picture of a woman in the Sun was that of the page 3 girl, even though Jessica
Ennis had just won her Olympic gold medal.
On the sentiment, I
cannot agree more. Women are under-represented in the media and their talents
and achievements should gain more recognition. However, this need not be at the
expense of page 3, and vice versa. The problem is that there are too few women
in the news, not that some of them are naked. Why argue for less page 3 when we
actually want more Jessica Ennis?
Of course we want a
society which judges everyone equally on their intelligence and personality but
any individual is no more just a mind than they are just an appearance. We each
have a body, one that should be loved and used and flaunted. To erase naked bodies
from our newspapers is to forget this. Nudity is a natural and healthy part of
our lives and one which the media is right to represent.
A telling comparison
made in this article by Zoe Williams, is that of page 3 and catwalk models.
Page 3 shoots portray their subjects as happy and healthy, a far cry from the
emotionless, starved look of high-end fashion models. Catwalk models are
essentially walking coat hangers, yet no one says that they are objectified.
The only difference is that they are clothed and page 3 models are not.
However, there is an issue
in today’s society with how women’s bodies are viewed, both by themselves and
by others, but this is not because we see too many topless women, it is because
all the topless women we see are the same. Page 3 models are nearly always
white, nearly always young and nearly always thin. In its 40 year history, page
3 has featured only 4 black models and only one of their models, Peta Todd, has
returned to work after having a baby. The Sun, like most of the media industry,
is creating a standard of beauty which is for most women dangerously
unachievable.
Of course, the group
most conspicuous in their absence from page 3 is men. I will repeat, nudity and
sexualisation are not bad, but what we see here is a dichotomy between men and
women. It’s okay for women to be naked and men to be clothed but it’s not okay
when this is universally the case. The media and entertainment industries are
typecasting us into very polarised portrayals of sexuality and it is here, when
the positions of the sexes become uneven and divided, that the issue arises and
objectification is allowed to rear its ugly head.
So, as for page 3,
let’s demand not abolition but diversification. Nudity is not inherently wrong,
nor is sexualisation. The danger is when it is just women, and just women of a
certain appearance, who are presented in this way. I want to see a page 3 which
celebrates the beauty of a range of bodies as diverse as Sun readers
themselves. Of course, there is a very valid question of whether people
actually want a photo of a naked body with their newspaper, whomever it belongs
to. However, this is a commercial, rather than feminist, question, and one
which I am sure the editors will ask themselves in time.
This is an interesting post Maddie, thank you for writing it. I think I generally disagree with you on this. The problem with the sexualisation of women (or indeed of men), is that it is insidious in the way it influences the minds of those who are exposed to it. Even a person who logically understands and agrees that women are of inherently equal value to men, can easily come, consciously or subconsciously, to view women as nothing more than objects, easily discarded playthings whose emotional health is of secondary, or even of no value, when compared to the man's own gratification. This goes further because as you rightly point out, there is an issue with the way women's bodies are viewed, and the most worrying part of this is how women view themselves (I would also add that this is a growing issue for men as well). Your point is that page 3 needs to diversify, and I would agree insomuch as it is better than how they currently operate, but of course I would prefer to see them stop operating altogether. The problem is that even with diversification, the models, by the very nature of page 3, would still be sexualised, and that is a huge problem amongst young people today. Both young men and young women, see a woman's value as a direct derivative of her sexuality. We need to move away from this. We need to celebrate sexuality in a healthy way, by saying your sexuality is important, but it doesn't define you. Your sexuality should be what you feel comfortable with it being, not what you think others require of you.
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