February 1983.
A picture of a 16-year-old school leaver appears on Page 3 next to the headline “Sam quits A-Levels for Ooh-Levels!”
27 years later, Page 3 is still as controversial as ever.
Celebrity Come Dine With Me recently feartured (among others) the self-proclaimed world’s first supermodel Janice Dickinson and the Page 3 model and 80s popstar Sam Fox. The format, for those who are unfamiliar, is a series of dinner parties hosted by each contestant on consecutive nights which are rated by the other contestants.
Janice Dickinson: You became the Page 3 girl at sixteen? You see my daughter is sixteen and there is no fucking way I’d let my daughter ever do that. You get famous at sixteen for bearing your breasts under a contract in kind of a scummy magazine?
Sam Fox: No no no… It’s a family newspaper. Madonna showed her boobs, Geri Halliwell showed her boobs…
Janice Dickinson: I’ve showed my boobs in French Vogue, y’know…
Sam Fox: But we all have to start somewhere, but the thing is I would never diss that. I have no regrets in that.
Janice Dickinson: I WILL NOT *slams table* allow my daughter to do it, I’m sorry.
Sam Fox (in interview): Page 3 is an institution in Britain, and it will always be. And it’s not top shelf, it’s a family newspaper. It’s not porn, y’know, it’s a pretty girl, with a nice pair of boobs, with a smile on her face.
I’ve come across similar defences of The Sun’s Page 3 before.
It’s a smiling and attractive girl who just happens to be topless.
It’s an expression of our permissive society.
Or maybe it’s just an invariably white, airbrushed and impossibly thin archetype of femininity.
She is uncomplicated and happy, a smile for the lads playing across her heavily made-up face.
I’m not going to sound out of touch. The Page 3 girls are not coerced. Models queue up to be selected, and the paper’s website even runs a ‘Page 3 Idol’ where women all over the country compete with self-styled shoots for the viewer ratings. Many of the Page 3 photographers are also women.
But we have to ask why.
Let’s not forget. Page 3 was Rupert Murdoch’s drive down-market. It was aiming for the working man. It has nothing to do with women’s rights except that it supposedly supercedes them. “A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual,” says Gloria Steinem, but unfortunately the institutions of soft pornography have recruited women themselves to the cause, under false pretensions that this is true ‘empowerment’.
Here are some factors that appear to contribute:
1) High pay and flexibility.
The jobs market for women who quit their A-levels is poor. Many models think that Page 3 and similar publications benefit them because they ‘couldn’t bare the 9 to 5.’ Looks they were born with, so it’s easy enough to put them to work.
2) If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
There is an attitude that the best approach to female sexuality is exhibitionism. It would be a waste, they say, to deprive the world of topless pictures of these women. It is seen as a celebration of ‘beauty’, despite the fact that the audience is mostly males with scant regard for this ‘artwork’ before them.
3) FREEDOM!
“SIXTEEN Page 3 Girls in all their glory represent the very image of freedom in this country,” as The Sun said in it’s ‘save these girls from the dole queue’ article. Is it such an expression of women’s freedom to take their clothes off for money? To allow a national newspaper to distribute their topless image throughout the country and wider world?
Page 3 is not and has never been about women, freedom, beauty or art.
It’s about making money, selling newspapers and transforming women into a consumer product along the way.
As a small town in Serbia erected a statue of Sam Fox in 2007, one fan had this to say:
“We are aware that her most famous attributes may require special treatment, so we are planning on using the best quality marble only.”
WOMEN HAVE BETTER ATTRIBUTES THAN THIS.
THESE WOMEN ARE A MARKETING TOOL, NOTHING MORE.
SO WITH THAT IN MIND, DOES PAGE 3 REPRESENT A MODERN BRITAIN?
NOT MINE.
This article was originally posted on i-am-the-lighthouse.tumblr.com
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Thanks for sharing this. I know what you mean when you say that a lot of women on page 3 of the Sun represent “an invariably white, airbrushed and impossibly thin archetype of femininity”. I am also concerned about the unrealistic looks page 3, lads mags etcetera promote as well as the messages they send out to young girls and women about where their “worth” lies in our society – not only to those who quit their A-levels. I think women generally have fewer chance of finding a well-paid job than men. Adding to this is the lure of being able to become famous and leading a celebrity lifestyle from the “lucrative” glamour model career.
I think that the fact that many girls who drop out of school see Page 3 as a good option is tragic, but it is a reflection of modern society. How many young men who drop out of school go and work exposing themselves in front of the general public? Very few.
If we deal with the sexism inherent in society then I am confident that things like Page 3 will disappear.
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George Morris wrote:
“How many young men who drop out of school go and work exposing themselves in front of the general public?”
The sports pages are FULL of semi-nude young men showing off their bodies. Granted, they are represented as autonomous while the page 3 girl is represented as depending on the objectifying glance of male readers, but the there is an obvious link between the male footballer’s body (he is nothing more than his body, if he’s injured it’s game out) and how his fans worship him and his body and how the same fans objectify the body of the page 3 girl, who very well could be his girlfriend. Their home life would then make the ideal porn movie.
Betty Friedan said, all those decades ago, that
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims.
The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
I have often come across this quote and to be honest it always makes me feel uneasy.
I am aware that men suffer too under patriarchy, but as men as a group are more privileged and powerful than women and I think and with that power comes a lot of responsibility – which is often not taken up by men. There is not enough information, knowledge or care for the amount of harm that is done to women by men on a daily basis.
As far as “women’s denigration of themselves” is concerned I am not sure what the words relate to in the context of the quote you give. What I do think however is that it is strange that women get blamed for going along with stereotypes etcetera, whilst men are excused from it based on their gender as if they could not help it. We all live in the same society and I think that we all get the same damaging messages from the media – some of which are targeted at specific genders. Others however are aimed at both women and men and I think it is insensitive and superficial to blame women for internalizing the negative images they are bombarded with.
I wish more women would breast feed in public – it might remind the world that breasts are for nurturing and nourishing, plumped up with milk and not silicon and not uncoupled from their reproductive purpose. In Western culture breasts have become a fetish of the male sexual imagination – -
‘Page 3 is not and has never been about women, freedom, beauty or art.’ Spot-on and remember these young women age as do all human beings and so what happens when these young women who are exploited by pseudo newspapers such as ‘The Sun’ become too old to be considered ‘sexually hot to men!’ Will these women be able to obtain well-paid employment or will they discover their ‘past’ is their sole means of obtaining employment.
Remember ‘page 3′ is all about profit, profit and yet more profit because this pseudo paper is aimed at men and even worse it perpetuates the myth that all men are identical wherein they must have their ‘daily dose’ of viewing naked images of women.
Blaming women is a very old trick and it continues ad naseum because our patriarchal/male supremacist system must never be analysed in order to understand how and why so many women internalise the lie that they are to blame for what is now an incessant 24/7 bombardment of women-hating and misogyny.
Janice Dickinson is right to condemn The Sun because women contrary to misogynistic claims are not the sum total of their ‘sexually hot bodies’ we like men are human and we like men are diverse. But unlike men we women continue to be reduced to dehumanised sexualised commodities but of course unlike men our ‘sexual hotness and sexual appeal to men’ has a very, very short shelf life. That is why The Sun has to constantly seek out new women because viewing the same image swiftly becomes very boring.
Re:
Betty Friedan said, all those decades ago, that
Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims.
The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.
Hi Lorna,
I have seen the devastation of internalised hatred and oppression, including how it expresses itself in silence and self-denigration, self-exploitation, and seemingly willful subordination to the oppressor group. I have seen this with anti-Semitism, anti-gay oppression, and racism across ethnicities that are not white.
But no political movement with any heart or soul makes the claim that THE problem is not with the actions of the oppressors, and is, instead, solely with the actions of the oppressed, subordinated, violated, and degraded.
This would mean that Indigenous people’s self-hatred, to whatever extent it is present, is the cause of genocide, not white Europeans committing genocide. This would mean that me being sexually assaulted at twelve was my fault, not the fault of the perp who assaulted me and many other children.
I cannot accept this oppressed-blaming perspective as representative of any feminisms I’ve held dear to me. Every feminist I knows wrestles mightily with internalised oppression and takes responsibility for that being her work. But to pretend one’s self-esteem work happens in a vacuum, as if self-esteem isn’t bombarded daily by actions the oppressors control, regulate, and mandate, would be to perpetuate a kind of denial about what oppression is and means.
Poor and working class people may well feel “inferior” to rich people in some circumstances, and that people who are unemployed are somehow at fault for their unemployment. But if we’re going to make that our ethic, our politic, then at what point do we hold rich people in charge of economic systems, corporations, news, and advertising, along with all other corporate media which sells us all the idea that anyone can become rich if they try hard enough? Not everyone can, and, in fact, capitalism requires poverty and slavery and always has. Are the poor and enslaved to perpetually blame themselves for their plight?
Is that what you wish to communicate to oppressed people who are on the bottom end of a structurally maintained social hierarchy–maintained with force and overt coercion seen and unseen?
This is a bit of a tangent from the discussion trail here – but I’d like to post youtube clip about the effect of pornography on the brain – I’m not much in favour of these ‘brain’ arguments as if the brain can be isolated, but there is something useful to take from this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEuuaZw3YyI
Thanks for this article – the normalisation of Page 3 is unbelievable. I was reminded this morning how much I LOATHE Page 3 when some technicoloured wanker was having a good old indulge on the train. I loudly said to him ‘Oh, that’s NICE,’ and after clocking me he proceeded to stare intently at the page, spread out fully over his knee, for the next 15 minutes until we got to London Bridge and I got off the train. I don’t think he was reading the articles.
His contempt for women was obvious, and he was successfully using the image of a dominated, naked woman to keep me in my place; I was humiliated and self-conscious, and very aware of my status as a member of the sex class. If a man can freely ogle pictures of young, submissive, hyper-feminine, sexually available women’s breasts placed in a mainstream paper as bits of meat for his titillation, then he need have no respect for the humanity and dignity of actual women around him.
An even weirder scenario is the respectful, polite, non-aggressive man who enjoys his Page 3 but behaves with (otherwise) impeccable politeness towards me on the train. Because Page 3 girls are ‘tarts’ and I’m a ‘real woman’, I deserve respect, but they don’t? What happens if I take my clothes off then? Scary.
I feel SO uncomfortable on public transport when I’m forced to share space with and sometimes touch men poring over pictures of women’s coyly posed half-naked bodies. It creates a hostile, sexual environment that I am unwillingly made part of.
So thanks for a great start to my day, Page 3 loser on the 8.39 to Cannon St today! I wish more men would think about how women around them feel, when they are looking at Page 3.
So many of us believe that having naked women in a mainstream national newspaper is a crucial obstacle in the drive toward an equal society.
We might also believe that having naked women in a mainstream national newspaper is a more profound case of objectification/dehumanisation than having naked women in self-professed pornographic material because the reader/user isn’t thinking of themselves as “using pornography” when they flip page 1 to page 3. This means the process of treating the woman as no more than a sexual object is lacking any self-awareness. The objectification/dehumanisation is deeply normal. That’s the really scary thing.
But, given all this, what can we do about it? Given that here is a website aimed at bringing men against porn together, how can this movement join with the women’s anti-porn movement to make this change: To make the portrayal of naked women in mainstream, national newspapers illegal.
“how can this movement [...] make the portrayal of naked women in mainstream, national newspapers illegal ?”
Eventually, by some sort of political campaign. It’s pretty hard to do though, due to neoliberal beliefs about “freedom of speech”. Research the Dworkin-MacKinnon Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance if you’re interested in a significant past attempt. The primary goal however, should be to educate the public about the affects of pornography and publicly rebut the arguments of those who support pornography.
“Could it be an infringement of the freedom of the press/ To print pictures of women in states of undress?”
(copyright Sir Billy Bragg, from his dissection of the Murdoch press classic, It Says Here)