Page 3 is no more. Sort of. After years of campaigning, by the likes of Lucy-Anne Holmes at No More Page 3, which gained supporters countrywide, it was announced yesterday that the 45-year-old ‘feature’, would no longer appear in *The Sun *newspaper.
For most of its life in the paper it divided opinion and in its demise, Page 3 is proving to be no different. It’s been hailed as a feminist triumph by some and by others, a calculated move by the paper to drive traffic online - the pictures will now be stored, presumably behind a paywall, at Page3.com.
So it’s still in existence, just safely tucked away on the internet. But this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a hollow victory. The point won, surely, is that the belittling pictures of women, which reduce an entire sex to nothing much more than a ‘bit of a skirt’, will no longer be in a news institution, found lying around in more than 13.6million British homes every week. The most-read ‘family’ paper in the UK, which claims to reflect and represent society by its nature will no longer show women quite so prominently as mindless sexbots. Children will be less likely to grow up subconsciously absorbing sexist images of women. And adults who want to see them can go looking for them - easy enough to find on the internet – while the rest of us won’t have them thrust in our faces for titillation over breakfast.
While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with naked women (thanks to Lena Dunham and ideas like herself.com, where Australian actress Caitlin Stasey is encouraging women to post their own naked pictures, we’re reclaiming nakedness more than ever) but there is something wrong in women being solely represented as sexual objects, literally stripped of their identities bar their bra size.
And if banning Page 3 helps diminish that, in any small way at all, then we’re behind it.
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