So: recently, a young woman, Lucy-Anne Holmes, started a petition on Change.org aimed at getting The Sun to stop featuring topless Page 3 girls*. The Internet seems to have done its work well, because it’s been all over Twitter for days, with endorsement from such stalwarts as Caitlin Moran** & Graham Linehan, and is now claiming over 27,000 signatures. Many of the proponents of #nomorepage3 have made reference to feminism and the general well-being of women as justifications for the quasi-campaign. Even more baffling was when I saw sex educators, sex radicals and other generally sex-positive (by which I include sex-critical) folks endorsing it.
Therefore, I think there is an even greater need for countervailing opinions from the perspectives of feminists. Which, in this case, is me. Nobody ever said life was fair. But there are 2 things I’m not going to touch on: whether or not P3 is porn – I think it is and I think the discussion about whether it isn’t is a waste of time; and whether or not sex related work is, to use a tired word, “empowering”. It’s a fucking job. Sometimes I find my (utterly non-sexy) job “empowering”, especially when I think of the unemployment stats and how miserable I felt when out of work, but mostly I do it to pay my bills & afford me the odd treat. I suspect workers in every industry are pretty much the same, with a possible exception for those fortunate few who dedicate their lives to doing what they love. Funnily enough, some of those people might even have sex-related jobs! So, if you care to read more about sex work as empowerment, check out Hayley Stevens’ Heresy Club piece*** instead. She even provides – gasp – evidence!
Right: #nomorepage3. I’m not going to beat about the bush here. I think this is a fucking terrible idea, and I think the ideas driving this idea should give us pause, because they’re actually rather scary.
Starting with the original petition itself, there’s something of a lack of clarity about its long-term aims. It mentions “asking Dominic Mohan nicely” (by his first name! Not terribly polite) to stop featuring Page 3 girls, and that’s about it. It also indicts misogyny as a driver of rape & sexual assault, but does so by making a strongly implied reference to the old and never-proven belief that porn causes or at least encourages rape. Certainly, the wording of the actual letter talks about “conditioning readers to see women as sex objects”. Frankly, this is a claim I’d like to see analysed in Bad Science or on Factcheck, but I’m not sure that wouldn’t simply be co-opting the work of the many writers & researchers (often women) who’ve been challenging this notion for years. It’s on a par with claims that video games cause violence, or LGBT people make bad parents; any time rigorous research is conducted, the purported connections cannot be found. I’m not saying its completely beyond the realms of possibility for these theories to be true, but when proposing social changes, particularly if they might involve legal restrictions, I want better evidence than this. That said, here is a neat little article by Stuart Ritchie**** (via Stevens) which gives some starting points. As you’ll note, he does not find that the evidence supports these assertions.
In fairness, I’m not wholly sure that #nomorepage3 is advocating legal restrictions, although I’ll come onto that later. Assuming for a moment that its sole aim is “asking nicely” and no more, then it can be seen as little more than a publicity stunt running along very old political & class lines. Now, there is always the possibility that The Sun will take the view that times have changed and P3 should go; I regard that as stunningly unlikely, but on the off-chance that they did, I think it would almost certainly be down to a combination of cost-cutting in an era of austerity & image rehabilitation in a post-Leveson world where their former editor has been changed with phone-hacking, rather than a sudden burst of respect for women. Oh well, we might say, it’s an ill wind and the result is what we wanted, so what? Well, the obvious “what”, to me, would be “what will they replace it with?”. I doubt it’d be especially feminist-friendly, but perhaps that’s also unfair of me. While I am not a Sun fan, they’ve done some occasional good work on social justice issues in the past (eg their anti-domestic violence campaign, or running a reasonably decent report on Slutwalk*****), and for all that we regard tabloids as a very blokey environment, they’ve typically employed a greater-than-average number of women journalists. And, lest we forget, they actually had a woman, Rebekah Brooks, as the senior editor for 6 years, which is almost unheard of elsewhere, including at more ‘respectable’ papers.
But getting back to the topic in hand, to reiterate Hayley Stevens’ point, how many of the #nomorepage3 signatories would actually buy the Sun if P3 was gone? I don’t have any figures on this, but my impression is that most of them neither buy The Sun now nor would buy it if it wasn’t riddled with tits. So why the hell, in the midst of print media’s continual freefall, should a commercial enterprise risk alienating a single existing customer to please a group they get nothing from already and probably never will? Yes, perhaps this should be treated as a moral issue rather than economic one, but in light of hacking & Hillsborough, who the hell is naive enough to think this is important to the Murdoch empire?
So I can’t see Mohan doing anything about this petition, which is probably the best outcome. A worse outcome is that he acknowledges it and uses it as a perfect excuse to solidify brand loyalty and further brand feminists as man-hating killjoys, as happened with Clare Short’s famous campaign against P3 in 1986+*. Deborah Orr has already foolishly set this issue up as being about a struggle between right-thinking feminists and unenlightened, presumably male-identified, idiots who would like to be glamour models. Women she disgustingly describes as being visible “in any city on a Friday night, hobbled by their Lycra dresses & towering heels, so keen to be ’empowered’ they can barely walk”+** (as if feminists never wear towering heels!) and in doing so, handed the right-wing end of the media the same big stick to bash women’s rights with. Even more stupidly, she implicitly tells us all that women fitting this description aren’t welcome in feminism. It’s no good complaining that feminism isn’t “really” like that, if this is someone’s first exposure to it. First impressions count. Sometimes they’re all you get.
We (feminists) don’t command a lot of media power generally, so we need to be careful about how we engage with it at all, and continuing to play into the stereotype of frumpy middle-class Guardianistas obsessed with minutiae in the face of shocking austerity is a bad, bad move, one which only serves to turn away the very people who arguably need feminism the most. So thanks for the classist own goal there, Deborah. But then, I’ve staggered merrily home from city centre nightclubs in thigh boots, corsets & underwear-as-outerwear in my youth too, so I suppose that must mean I can’t be a feminist either.
Ah yes, you might say, but what about the sexism? Isn’t that dangerous & damaging to women? Well, of course it is, but, to paraphrase Susie Bright+***, picking on porn, or even on one specific kind of porn, and making that your focus for tackling sexism, is like drinking from several glasses of salt water & declaring only one of them salty. There’s plenty of sexism in porn, and I don’t deny that P3 is an example of it (I personally think the text is far more problematic that the images, but that’s by the by), but why start with the overtly sexual images? I don’t have to look very far to find revealing pictures of women in the mainstream media. Leaving aside the choice not to include other papers like the Daily Star in the “polite request”, I can look at degrading, body-hating pictures of women any day just by turning to the Daily Mail or ‘Heat’ magazine. At least P3 girls choose to be photographed and get paid for doing it; the unfortunate celebrities who have their privacy invaded so we can ogle them stumbling drunkenly out of nightclubs or laugh at their cellulite and “baby flab” because they’ve dared to wear a bikini on a beach never asked for the attention. Orr’s article even opens by talking about the topless Kate Middleton photos & goes on to make this somehow about P3, instead of drawing the obvious conclusion that the way women’s bodies are used for public consumption is a general problem. I can only conclude that it is the sexual focus of P3 which makes it seem more objectionable, as if wanting to fuck someone is more degrading to them than talking about how ugly they are for daring to be imperfect in public. And of course, the Mail has a sizeable female readership & often puts these kinds of features in ‘Femail’. ‘Heat’ is largely written by & for women. But if we included these examples, then we’d have to talk about how women enforce institutional sexism by policing each other, and that it isn’t just heterosexual male desire which is the conveniently simple problem to be fixed. This is a particularly pertinent conversation right now, since in the last week, both Kira Cochrane% and Tanya Gold%% have written articles about the specifically misogynist ways in which paparazzi culture attacks women, and the ways that our culture uses revealing images, published without permission, to shame women for their sexuality. Frustratingly, Gold also seems to think that P3 is somehow part of this problem despite the clear differences I have already outlined above; nevertheless, she does also go on to detail how the problem isn’t solely sexual in tone, so credit where it’s due. If #nomorepage3 were fit for purpose, it would also include a letter to Paul Dacre, asking him to stop printing stories about, say, Lady Gaga’s weight. But it doesn’t, and to me that is highly significant.
Anti-sex agendas being cloaked in paternalistic language about “protecting” women are nothing new, and they are often entrenched in deeply essentialist & misogynist ideas about women themselves, no less so when it’s women promoting them. Those who’ve been on the receiving end – ask a woman who’s worked worked in a sex industry or ‘glamour’ role in some capacity – often cynically note that the desire to “help” & “protect” women doesn’t extend to the desire to do so economically; as long as they keep their legs shut & their clothes on, they can starve on minimum wage as far as their protectors are concerned. Is it any wonder women doing these jobs are unimpressed? To steal a line from Neil Gaiman, glamour modelling probably does beat working shifts in a Bradford biscuit factory! But their poorer sisters are expected to accept that instead, to make middle-class feminists feel more secure in their nice homes? Please. Of course, as Mark Steel observed about the abolition of slavery+****, pretty much every appalling practice in history has been justified at some point by the claim that it provides work, and that doesn’t make any of them OK, but a commitment to harm reduction really ought to merit a close look at the specifics of the practice you want to see ended. If the people you think you’re trying to help want you to fuck off, that probably ought to tell you something.
As I said, I don’t know if #nomorepage3 wants to see more formal restriction on its target, because it’s been quite coy about what Stage 2 will be, once the polite request fails. But if Holmes or her signatories actually would like to see some sort of ban or age limit or sales restriction or anything of this sort, then they’re even bigger fools than I thought. If they haven’t thought long & hard about the implications, they need to shut up until they do. If they have but still want such an outcome, they and their agendas need to be rejected with the force of an imploding star. Because such approaches cause genuine, demonstrable harm, usually to groups who were already marginalised. Forgetting for a moment the liberal arguments about free choice and the right for the state not to interfere in our private lives, there are much more specific threats, many of which have been realised in the recent past.
In ‘Among Us, Against Us: Right-Wing Feminism’+*****, his article focusing mostly on the impact of Canada’s 1992 anti-porn laws under the so-called Butler decision (which drew its inspiration from the legal theories of Catherine MacKinnon), Patrick Califia observes that:
“so-called ‘feminist’ porn laws will not be enforced by feminists. They will be enforced for the most part by straight white men who think lesbianism is more degrading and more threatening to women than date rape or sexual harassment”
12 years on, those words seem as relevant as ever. He details how the scattergun approach of Canadian customs ended with the seizure of everything from ‘Hothead Paisan’ to (somewhat amusingly) Andrea Dworkin’s own works and a chili cookbook titled ‘Hot, Hotter, Hottest’, but the common theme was that it was queer, kinky, small-time producers & distributers who got hammered, both financially and legally, and that Butler had “almost no visible impact on the straight porn industry”. What a coincidence. Who could possibly have guessed that those generally doing the most to undermine the kyriarchy would be the ones attacked by its agents as a means of implementing a law purportedly existing for the purpose of furthering social justice? Well, I’d like to think anyone capable of critical thinking could have seen how this would work out, but apparently not. Make no mistake about it, when you advocate restricting naughty images & dirty words, you will hurt real people, and you will disproportionately hurt women, LGBT folk and others who are already further from political power (see debates about the “inherently exploitative” nature of porn featuring disabled performers for more on that). See the treatment of Simon Walsh and the travesty of the recent #porntrial++*, if you’re in any doubt about how it works. Yet the anti-porn feminists never seem to learn, or they don’t care.
No doubt at least some of #nomorepage3’s supporters would insist that they’re not trying to stop people enjoying ‘On Our Backs’, Indie Porn Revolution or dyke-run fisting workshops, only bad, tacky, misogynist, completely irredeemable porn like P3, or whatever else they deem as such, and indeed I’ve seen loads of comments claiming to be fine with x other aspect of porn or sex-related work, but just not Page 3. Again, Califia’s view was “You can’t write a law that will remove a porn book from the shelves but leaves ‘Our Bodies Ourselves’ unscathed”. Now, I disagree here: I think you probably can, but it’ll just be a bad law, and frankly not that different from existing case law in the UK which has seen “obscene” works permitted based on their redeeming artistic merit. Which brings us back to the old saw that pleasure for its own sake is wrong, and reinforces the class hatred which underpins the false distinction between ‘erotica’ and ‘porn’. Or, as Richey James Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers observed in a 1994 ‘Select’ article, the difference is that “erotica has a Man Ray cover”++**. Maybe some of you want to live in a world where we’re stuck with either Man Ray or OBO when we want to get off, but I don’t. Legislating aesthetics is a dangerous business.
And make no mistake about it, what we’re talking about is aesthetic. I don’t disagree that Page 3 is sexist, and I also don’t disagree with Deborah Orr about the element of nastiness in the Sun’s editorial policies. But our entire culture is riddled with misogyny: telling me Page 3 is the problem is like telling me that hanging is too cruel a death penalty & I’m going to get a lethal injection instead. Gee, thanks guys. Again, I’m sure Orr & Holmes want to see the culture as a whole tackled too, not just P3, but their choice of priorities is telling. To learn more about Holmes’ view of what ‘proper’ sex involves, see her blog under How To Start A Sexual Revolution++*** and be disappointed by the narrowness of her vision and her snarking about how a porn actor “should have brushed her tongue” . She describes sex as “an amazing, loving union between two people where you pleasure each other, it ends in waves of bliss”. Well, that sounds utterly radical and not at all like the limited & essentialist view of sex anyone else has been selling all these years. If what gives you waves of bliss is having anonymous sex with strangers, or sex with more than 2 people, or hell, sex with ZERO other people, then you, my friend, are doing it wrong. If you’re a woman who enjoys having her head held when she gives a blowjob, or a chubby teen who gets off on masturbating for a webcam, then you’re a traitor, sister, and you’d better start training your cuntini to tingle at the loving caresses of a respectful man instead of school uniforms or ageplay. Fine for Holmes to seek out sexual fulfilment as she desires it; not fine to try & tell the rest of us that’s how it should be. Why Holmes thinks she’s an authority on how sex should be performed when her research consists of poking Google and she freely admits to finding buttplugs hilarious (this is kind of sweet but still) is beyond me, but I’ve been told blogging can give you an inflated sense of your own importance. I’m fortunate it hasn’t happened to me but then, what I say is right, obviously. ++****
While I’ve always thought “why aren’t you concentrating on a more important issue!?” to be a deeply unhelpful criticism of activism, I’m aware I may appear to be saying exactly that. Well, I do think the P3 obsession is an example of fixating on a small and specific, totemic concern while failing to consider the wider setting, but I hope it’s clear that I don’t think it’s too small to matter. On the contrary, I think the way the campaign has recreated divisions between women along class and political lines, reified the virgin/whore dualism and allowed personal objections of taste to be treated as unassailable ideological positions is indeed a big deal and something to be taken seriously. The idea that all women must either oppose P3 or be dupes and pimp-mongers is both essentialist thinking par excellence and is also one of the types of sex worker silencing detailed in a recent post on the Feminist Ire blog%%%, which I highly recommend. As ever, identifying a problem which needs action (in this case, sexism) doesn’t mean that the action proposed is going to solve the problem. Let’s stop leaping on these bullshit bandwagons which exclude whole groups and do nothing to advance women’s rights in general, except to allow some more educated white women in the Global West to pat themselves on the back yet again for their brilliant achievements. Maybe next time we can come up with something useful instead.
NOTES
* http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/dominic-mohan-take-the-bare-boobs-out-of-the-sun-nomorepage3
** In ‘How To Be A Woman’, Moran talked about having watched lots of porn & been disappointed by how little genuine fun was being had, saying she would happily pay to see such a thing. Now, I’d say she just needs to be introduced to better porn, but why should Caitlin Moran be happy to watch cheerful fucking but not happy for others to peer at tits over breakfast? That gets harder to justify. Mind you, she also, shamefully, referred to strippers as “Vichy France with tits”, so she may just not have thought this out very clearly. For the record, I have liked Moran since I saw her on ‘Naked City’ in 1992 (I think) & generally enjoyed her book, but nobody gets a free pass from me.
*** http://heresyclub.com/2012/09/page-3-objectifcation/
**** http://timeoutofmindblog.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/evidence-based-masturbation-or-the-science-of-porn/
***** http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4546694/Underwear-protest-at-10-Downing-Street.html – yes, I’m sure the presence of scantily-clad young women helped, but the article was not, in fact, full of cheesy references to this, which was a pleasant surprise. Of course, since then Slutwalk London have embarrassed themselves on Twitter with Assange apologism, but that just goes to underline the old saying about a week being a long time in politics. Sarah Ditum wrote about this here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/28/slutwalk-london-julian-assange?newsfeed=true
+* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Short#Member_of_Parliament
+** http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/14/sun-page-3-visible-tip-misogynys-iceberg
+*** in her article about Catherine MacKinnon from the collection ‘Sexwise’ (Cleis Press 1995). You can read an excerpt here: http://harelbarzilai.org/heros/sb.mackinnon.html
Or you could buy ‘Sexwise’, which is great and now available as an e-book.
% http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/sep/22/creepshots-revenge-porn-paparazzi-women
%% http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/tanya-gold-we-need-to-boycott-misogynistic-paparazzi
+**** from ‘Vive La Revolution!’ (Scribner 2004), his comedic history of the French Revolution. It is lovely.
+***** see ‘Public Sex’, a Cleis Press collection of his non-fiction political articles about sex from c.1978-2000. I personally think people should read everything Patrick Califia has written, but this in particular is a must-buy. Own your own copy & send Califia some love in the form of cold hard cash!
++* http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/09/extreme-porn-trial-anatomical-lesson
++** http://homepage.eircom.net/~manics/Articles/SelSep94.htm
++*** http://howtostartasexualrevolution.com/about/
++**** I know this is true because some like-minded people on the Internet told me so.
%%% http://feministire.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/just-dont-call-it-slut-shaming-a-feminist-guide-to-silencing-sex-workers/
If you’ve made it this far – congratulations! Here is an excellent article about poverty & class from a former stripper & sex worker. It’s very good, please read it even if you think sex work should be banned. Especially then:
Hunter Not The Hunted 
Interesting thoughts. Not sure if I agree yet, but thanks for expressing this perspective.
That’s great, thanks for stopping by to comment. Happy to read more of your thoughts if you choose to comment further.
Reblogged this on Feminist Ire and commented:
Seriously, read this post. It’s spot-on in every single way.
Thank you so much, that’s great. There are a lot of excellent posts on Feminist Ire so I’m very flattered.
Total agreement with everything, hope you dont mind but rather than tldr going to link to my thoughts on this. Not half as well explored because in the week of Hillsborough i was just fecking angry! http://itsjustahobby.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/tits/
No that’s great, thanks for the link. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your piece & I thought your critique of the baffling comparison to TV news was spot-on. Would you mind if I link to it on Twitter?
On another note, you mention how our TV news isn’t very political. I don’t know if you’ve seen the reports this week attacking the BBC for failing to cover the NHS break-up in any depth? It occurs to me that being superficially ‘apolitical’ or ‘balanced’ can also be a political position ( I think John Pilger wrote about this issue in the 80s), and to wonder if too much neutrality could be a negative for the UK. I’m glad we don’t have a Fox News but I don’t think that absence means it’s all rosy, if you see what’s mean.
Anyway, some very interesting thoughts provoked, ta for that.
Feel free to link on twitter, and thank you. I did find it baffliing and offensive. I understand what you are saying about not having too rose tinted a view of the BBC and other mainstream news broadcasters, we tend to watch Al Jazeera, and in a world where the former head of the Young Conservatives can be the Political Editor of the BBC all is not well. I
Perhaps I would have been better saying that the newspapers are explicitly political in this country, and that any understanding of them, and campaign against them needs to be aware of this .
Done!
I get your point and I think it’s entirely valid. The ways in which media outlets are politicised are really important to consider; The Sun’s politics is very relevant here, so is that really what the petition objects to?
I definitely think there’s a lot to be said for AJE these days, the quality of their reporting seems to bea out the Beeb quite often these days :-(
Cut outs of boobies are common place in make dominated places across the country. It’s the modern day version of the pin up girl, which gives men (and women) fantasies, dreams, escape from the grind, morale boost. There’s a reason why pin up cards were so important in the world wars of last century, or even further back; why ballads and tales of sweet succulent round hipped and juicy breasted maidens were a hit in medieval times.
Let’s face it, sexuality is all around us all the time, always has been, in whatever means of media or communication available. What we can control is what or how it is expressed, so why not give a healthy image of it. Getting rid of things like p3 won’t promote a great image of women, it won’t prevent sexual deviance, it won’t prevent sexual crimes- if anything- it will promote a template of repression and shame and THAT is the stuff that tends to be more likely to lead to wackier unhealthy notions about sex.
Thinking that any photo leads to depravity or fetish is an opinion made by naive idealists who haven’t done their psyche research. Many fetishes start as far back as in the womb, wiring or programming the brain to associate sexual pleasure or desire, to something like a thought or an object as a trigger. There is no such thing as a teen without a fetish, let alone grown ups. Try to hush it, it grows back louder. And boy, do we not want to talk about it in our culture!
whether it be a particular perfume, a romantic phrase, the sound of popping balloons, the feel of furry things against the skin, or a feeling of authority, or the feeling of sun on your face that you had when you experienced your first kiss,…or taking bath because you touched your genitals in there as a toddler like most toddlers do without knowing that it’s sexual expression… Everyone has something that will trigger a sexual thought or feeling (unless they are asexual), and a titty pic won’t exactly be the cause of them all. Really, when I work as a professional Dom for many years, I always had the more ‘out there’ fetishes come from people who were repressed from things like pornography or dating.
The pictures show women being sexually empowered, what with hopeful souls who would do anything to say hello let alone date them, albeit even if only in their heads. It also gives us the freedom to follow suit and also express our innate sexiness, rather than think it needs to be hidden, shamed. That to express ones own sexuality is criminal and state controlled. With people telling us not only how and when to express or take part in sexual activity, but also sexual thought.
Porn has been part of little boys growing up and discovering their sexuality, figuring out what they feel attraction to including gender. Has been for a very long time, whether it be stories around a camp fire orhubting expeditions, or a picture on the roman bath walls. Any mother who thinks their 16 year old has never seen porn or doesn’t want to see porn had better take their blinkers off, wake up, and smell the cum on their teenagers sheets. if anything, I’d be wondering even worried if a kid hadn’t seen any. Although, Asexuality is common enough as well and needs to be discovered and accepted. Seeing ones high school peers get noticeably interested over P3 whilst you don’t yourself, can be part of figuring that out.
I would instead ask the newspapers and other publications to start including sexy pictures of some men! Perhaps even real women too of different shapes, sizes and looks. To create a healthy accepting approach to sexuality and show girls and boys that yes you are able to be sexy, even if your short and bald, or have a big bum. Let’s promote women’s work, power, expression rather than ban it, shun it, and ostracism those who would dare to wear a bra though it supports their knockers from giving them a bad back, or wearing a necklace that leads the eye to their breasts when it makes them feel good or confident.
If you ban p3, do you also have to ban teen boys dating to look when a girl in a short skirt bends over to pick something up, resulting in a stiffy? Should we shame the stiffy? Personally, I think hooray for that is one healthy stiffy that will give some woman or man much fun and pleasure even if I’m not interested in it myself. There’s so many poor guys out there with erectile issues of all ages. Funny, we don’t see people setting up petitions against porn showing lots of stiff penises everywhere giving the wrong impression that penises across the globe always work all the time, giving men much shame or objectifying their worth through a working stiff willy. Poor blokes really, they are questionably the ones harmed by modern pornography really. It’s funny how depression, low self esteem, sexuality issues, suicide etc is so high in young men – yet we only stop and think of how anything has an impact on women. Yet I’ve lost count of how many men I’ve seen in my practice who have huge confidence issues about their sexuality or workings of their genitalia, that their self worth comes down to whether they have a cock that works or not. Certainly, getting rid of p3 isn’t going to help that will it? Hiding sex won’t help the situation, but developing ways of showing that they aren’t alone will.
Do we stop adverts of women in expensive clothing because it supposedly automatically leads us to seek a partner with money- objectifying men as influence and money makers?
Do I need another person, male or female, tell me when I can or can’t feel sexual attraction? What if we show how many people are sexually attracted to or get pleasure from shoes, do we ban a shoe sale advert?
If we want to show and allow for healthy sexual behavior in the community, than it can be argued that we need more porn or rather, a variety of real men and women pornography educating others that to be horny is ok. Stopping porn wont stop them exploring and expressiong it, and if you want to stop teen pregnancy than stopping p3 wont help either, whatvis more likely to help is a better approach to sex ed from parents and menors.
Older tribal societies before the age of religious zealots and civilization would have sex all around them as part of their lives, with children being made aware from young, witnessing adults in the act, being shown what sex can be. They would sleep in the same room or dwelling as other kids, adults, old people, some of whom would be doing it. Yep somehow you don’t hear of many of them having whacky or violent desires. These communities still exist today. They certainly don’t have rampant issue of incest, violent sex, deviancy or other things that extreme blinkered feminists claim that open show of sexuality will do to people.
Oh and, Yes ye mothers and fathers out there, if you want to encourage open unashamed discussion and expression of sexuality in your kids you can rely on thing like p3 to start that birds and bees conversation. Education begins will a good conversation at home, not blaming a picture for all your kids problems.
To be honest, I’m not in favour of pin-ups in the workspace because I don’t think it’s appropriate, people have to go to work & they should be able to do so with minimal discomfort. I don’t think work is a good place to express our sexual interests, and I don’t think we should have to engage with other people’s porn there. In addition, there is a long history of men using porn in the workplace to harass women, so tackling that seems like a priority. Work is for working, not for discussing our sexual interests.
This seems to me very different from porn that people choose to buy & engage with, hence my distinction.
Hurrah! This is excellently put, I wrote a post about why I wouldn’t be signing it on XOJane.co.uk and got somewhat shot down due to the understanding that therefore I must be for Page 3. Sigh.
Hiya, may I have a link to your pos? I’d like to read it. Thanks.
Thanks for this. I am inclined to agree with your points (though you’ve linked to so many additional things it will take me a while to catch up with everything, I may post again once I have done so! As an aside Kira Cochrane’s piece is horrifying).
There are two things that have stuck in my head since reading this:
a) the fundamental issue is about consent. The kyriarchy surrounding P3 may contrive to create an environment where taking off your clothes seems the lesser of many awful choices, but it is still assumed to be a consensual decision. As you point out, most of the P3 models have not expressed support for this (with a few notable exceptions). I think in this I’m in total agreement with you, that it is puritanical anti-porn stigma that is driving the campaign.
b) I would have liked to see you address the issue of exposure to young people – how can we justify having a watershed on TV (which a breast cancer awareness ad has been subjected to), whilst having sexualised topless photos of women in newspapers and magazines available to anyone? I realise this isn’t at all restricted to P3 or the sun.
Good points.
a) I think the idea of ‘free’ choice is a fairly philosophical one, most of us make our choices in restricted circumstances with limited knowledge. But this doesn’t, I think, make those choices something we can conveniently ignore when it doesn’t suit us. Like it or not, real people are involved. I don’t know of any comments by P3 models either way, but I’d be interested to know mor if you do.
b) I think there are two issues here, one about the astute & level of exposure of breasts/nakedness generally, and one about whether or not such exposure can be harmful. I fully agree that restricting breast cancer awareness because OMGBOOBZ! is silly & dangerous, and personally I’d like to see more, particularly non-sexual, depictions of unenhanced naked bodies just on ordinary things, like breast-feeding. As to the justification, different standards exist between tv/film and print media or a range of subjects (compare books depicting fisting with videos depicting fisting for ease of access!), and I think that’s more an anomaly of the system than anything else, though it does illustrate some kind of belief that moving images are more realistic & hence more dangerous, I think.
As to danger, I don’t believe seeing nakedness, or even sexual activity, is intrinsically harmful to young people. Seeing violence might be, but even research on that isn’t exactly conclusive either. I’d prefer, obv, good & wel-rounded depictions of bodies & of sex, but if th choice wa between bad depictions & no depictions, I’d probably choose some information over total ignorance. Fortunately, those are not our only Two options.
Thanks for the comment!
What about pictures of David BECKHAM in the Sun, what is your view on that?
Pretty neutral, to be honest. I don’t know if you mean pornographic pictures of him or not, so it’s hard fr me to give any mor detailed answer than that. Feel free to expand if you wish.
fantastic article, I have posted it to a couple of ppl on facebook who support this campaign, which I think is massively misplaced. The references to what happened in Canada are very interesting and should be used as a warning to anyone trying to get stuff banned that they don’t like. I am not a fan of the Sun at all and think there are MANY reasons for it to be closed down, but Page 3 is the least of them.
I’m always surprised at how many middle class women would prefer models (who they normally perceive to be thick and poor) to work crappy receptionist or office or factory jobs rather than earning more a day than I’m on getting their boobs out. The idea that these girls enjoy the job, the attention and only having to work a couple of days a week while the rest of us idiots slave away in offices completely misses them.
I would be interested in what they would say if there was a lesbian friendly newspaper that printed pictures like Page 3, whether they would still call on it to be banned, or whether THAT would be OK because it’s not men looking at it.
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I think this is a very well reasoned argument. It also prompted me to go to Lucy Holmes’s post about her ‘beautiful sex’ and chide her for failing to see that beauty is subjective and it is not for her to decide whether or not someone else can feel that the thrill of being tied up and choked is beautiful (let’s see whether the comment gets published after moderation, even with my deliberate use of polite and fair language).
The part of your argument that I have to say I agree with most is the idea that it’s far less degrading to put a nearly naked girl in print because she’s desirable than it is to put a celebrity in a bikini in print because she has the same stretch marks on her thighs as almost any other girl who got more than an inch taller during puberty. It’s certainly disturbing that this is deemed less of an issue than a pair of tits.