Page 3 was the least offensive thing in The Sun

We’re cross-posting (with permission) this great piece by desiredxthings on the demise of Page 3 — T.S.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE DEMISE OF PAGE 3

Well, the tits are gone and now all of our lives are meaningless. Wherever will feminism go now the patriarchy is crushed?

The No More Page 3 campaign has been a mess from the beginning – it was the online milieu of the middle class, white feminists who have been stomping all over minorities for decades. Anti slut-shaming has become trendy, so rather than telling other women not to get their breasts out in the first place, mainstream feminism is dictating how and when to get your breasts out – and evidently getting your breasts out for payment is verboten. But this is okay, of course.

It initially came across as a fairly benign campaign, to keep boobs out of a family paper. We can’t have kiddies staring at norks, can we? But… to try and position The Sun as a family newspaper, a main argument of NMP3, is laughable. If you want your children to have access to misogyny, homophobia, racism, antagonism towards those on state welfare, ableism, xenophobia, whorephobia and a whole host of other oppressive bullshit, that’s your own bad parenting; but don’t call it a family newspaper.

Let’s get this straight, I don’t really care about the titillation of men and I’m not even going to trouble myself analysing this as a free speech issue – those aren’t what I’m concerned about. I’m concerned as a sex-worker in a time where the well-funded face of feminism sees us, at best, as an inconvenience on the journey to the gender equal utopia and, at worst, despicable gender traitors. No More Page 3 has tried to deny claims that they are opposed to sex workers or nudity; that’s all well and good, but why does what they do completely counteract that? Their claim is that other glamour modelling opportunities exist; but they either fail to grasp or completely ignore the importance of page 3 to a glamour model. The Sun is the most popular publication in the country and high circulation means higher exposure. One photo in The Sun can lead to countless other opportunities. NMP3 have removed a stepping stone for many glamour models (many of which do not have agents and have to navigate the industry alone) and hacked away at a career route.

The NMP3 debate has turned into an excuse for ‘feminist’ men to belittle women who oppose it in the most patronising way possible. A woman having a ‘wrong’ feminist opinion seems a perfect excuse to tell her how wrong she is – in the name of feminism, of course. The campaign itself used famous misogynist Russell Brand as an unofficial spokesman. I’ve unfollowed about twenty people for being patronising dickheads in the wake of the ban; fifteen have been men. They’ve misapplied enough Marx to diagnose us with false consciousness and are here to put us right. Thanks dudes!

This terrific piece by Ladybeard touches on the disparity of analysis given to the perception of the model, and the model themselves.

“…A classist, liberal and mainstream feminism that sees women’s agency not as what they can do, but what we shouldn’t be exposed to.
…
That the body in question is controlled solely by the gaze upon it and not the mind that drives it. That the woman modelling must be so uneducated and lower class that she couldn’t understand the patriarchal structures she’s playing in.”

Consensual boobies have been replaced with candid boobies. The women on page 3 are still going to be ogled at, without the benefit of their consent and payment. A page 3 model is having the photos taken on her terms, the photos are intended to look nice and not humiliate the model. Page 3 was never there to criticise them, unlike its creepy replacement. A woman earning a couple of hundred quid for engaging in consensual photography is the least offensive thing in The Sun. There are already an abundance of non-consensually snapped breasts in OK! And Heat magazine – except these have the much maligned nipple in them, too.

Read the full post here and follow @desiredxthings on twitter