Of course, for every Blachman there is a woman like Lucy-Anne Holmes, who founded the No More Page 3 campaign: working to end the frankly weird anomaly in which the Sun—ostensibly a family newspaper—features a young, naked, usually white topless girl, Monday to Friday. (There are no tits in the Saturday edition. When I inquired about this, I discovered that the logic is that the “working man,” at his workplace, was thought to need “cheering up” with tits on weekdays, but on Saturday he had football, instead, and so can give knockers a rest until Monday again. Oh, men! Other men represent you so badly! You should be furious at the patronizing way you are thought of.)
Fighting a long and often brutal online campaign, No More Page 3 eventually won in 2015: there are no topless Page 3 girls in the Sun anymore. It was a beautiful example of how feminism works: there are a million small tasks to be completed, and we all pick one, according to our interests and abilities, and fight it calmly, correctly, with determination and humor.
And that is how the future is made.
Look, who knows what will be happening with Page 3 of the Sun by the time this column is printed. The bosoms are out, the bosoms are covered up, the bosoms come out again—it’s like sitting on a nudist beach on a particularly changeable day, weather-wise.
But whether they stay or whether they go, I still feel it’s important to clear up just why something as ostensibly “innocent” as a lovely girl showing off her smashing duckies in a newspaper has “incurred” the “wrath” of “feminists,” although tbh whenever you see that phrase you should imagine not Medusa riding her Man-Hating Chariot out onto the battlefields, waving a staff made of severed penises and screaming, “I AM FURIOUS! I COME TO CHANGE THE WORLD AS YOU KNOW IT, AND DESTROY ALL CIVILIZATION!,” but, instead, some tired-looking women sadly sending off some polite emails while whispering, “I’m so tired of this shit. Batman never had to get together a petition with two hundred fifty thousand signatures on it when he wanted to change things. He just went and rammed the Batmobile into the Penguin’s den. Why can’t I ram a Batmobile into the Penguin’s den? I wish I was Batman.”
So. First things first. Why do feminists want to ban Page 3? Is this because they’re all UGLY JEALOUS LESBIANS? Well, no—although I must remind everyone that the opinion of an “ugly,” “jealous” lesbian is absolutely equal to that of a horny straight man who wants to see some breasts. There’s absolutely no moral superiority in wanting to look at young girls’ tits. You’re not Nelson Mandela here, dude. You’re as emotional and biased as the “ugly,” “jealous” feminists.
The reason a lot of women are down on Page 3 is simply down to context. In 2015, there are naked breasts everywhere. We’re living in a boom time for boobies. No one is running short on tits. We’re up to our tits in tits. You can type “tits” into pretty much any piece of technology you have and see some.
And as far as I’m concerned, having porn in the porn places is fine. Carry on. It’s just having it in a newspaper—surrounded by war and economics, and high-profile celebrity rape cases—that looks weird, because it’s essentially demented admin. It’s incorrect filing. Because if you put tits in the wrong place, they’re going to cause trouble. Tits on a railway track = trouble. Tits in a microwave = trouble.
For here’s what happens if you have young girls’ breasts in a newspaper. You’re ten, at school, laying out newspaper on the tables, in preparation for art. And some boys find Page 3 and gather round it, making jokes. And then they turn to the girl who’s most “well developed,” and say, “Do yours look like that? Show us!” or—to the flat-chested girl—“Haha! You need a boob job!”
And it’s probably your first experience of that awful, incoherent rage/shame that you feel when your body is objectified. And you’re ten. And you wonder how those boys would feel if Page 3 was pictures of huge, hard cocks on sixteen-year-old boys, instead—and all the girls were gathered around it, going, “I bet you wish you had one of those, Mark—instead of what looks like the worm in the bowler hat in the Mr. Men books.”
You suspect their dads might want to sign a petition, too, when they came home crying.
Because it’s just an unnecessary bit of hassle—having to deal with a world where little children see pictures of naked girls in a family newspaper. Page 3 makes needless problems.
Then there’s the suddenly concerned men who are “upset” that removing Page 3 will take jobs away from working-class glamour models. I don’t worry about these guys so much, because I presume that their concern has been long-standing and well-informed, and that they have a checkable record of campaigning for the employment rights of young working-class women—that they are members of the Fawcett Society, speak out in favor of gender quotas, and are vocal about the 19 percent disparity in male/female wages.
I presume that, because it would be weird if the only time they’d ever spoken out about their concerns was solely and specifically about the jobs for topless working-class girls. You probably wouldn’t be asked onto Newsnight as an economics analyst with that kind of very narrowcast specialty: pervonomics.
What else? Well, it’s so bafflingly narrowcast, isn’t it? Online porn has a wide-ranging and ardent love of big chicks, black chicks, Asian chicks, and lesbians. Page 3 has the air of being curated by one old man, sitting obdurately at the Page 3 Decisions Desk, commissioning endless shots of slim, straight white chicks and saying, “I knows what I like,” over and over again.
A whole, controversial page in a newspaper tied to this odd, narrowcast vision of sexiness. Alienating 52 percent of your potential readership. Looking, culturally, in 2015, like a misplaced item in the bagging area.