No More Page 3!

OP can I buy your username if you get bored of it? I love it!

Royally I heard a bit on (I think) newsnight last night and they said the sun's 'page 3 on-line' is staying they also said that RM has made the decision as his readers no longer wanted it. Not because he has bowed to pressure from the campaign.

That being said the campaign was to remove it from printed papers available everywhere and to that end the campaign has worked. I am happy. It's a start.

Doesn't have a place in a "news" paper since breasts aren't actually news

There's lots of things which wouldn't count as 'news' in these sorts of papers though. Don't really see the difference between a paper and lads mags personally. If you want to read the news, you're hardly likely to buy The Sun are you?

Bit hypocritical to say it's ok in lads mags and not The Sun.

they're not paid that much

Their choice indeed, just keep soft porn out of daily newspapers.

Isn't feminism about giving women choice? What about women who WANT to be topless models and are probably paid a lot of money for doing so?

I think it's only the print version that's stopping, they'll carry on online

I can't believe the Sun has bowed to the pressure of the minority. Page 3 is a British Institution, builders all over the land buy the Sun for it's page 3 content. Hopefully pressure from their readers will have it reinstated soon enough.

they might want to update their google search results. But of course it's just "celebrating the female form" not about lust and sleazy men.

Awesome news, it's about time!

in bikinis, not topless

actually, I'm in Costa and there's one on the table I've just sat down on (as well as a Mail - so not previously occupied by a MNer :) ) and I can reveal that it is:

2 hollyoaks "babes" Jennifer and Gemma running on a beach in Dubai.

Does anyone have a copy of the s*n? (Rather unlikely, i'll admit...)

What's on p3 today?

LittleHornbill I'm afraid I agree with you

If are still reserving page 3 for pictures of pretty women, whose job is to be looked at by men, then it's no so much that the problem has gone away than that the goalposts have moved slightly. It's a step in the right direction, but the overall assumption that women are there to be looked at hasn't changed at all.

To me, the issue was not the nudity but the objectifying of women. If they are still using page 3 for images of women, with the only purpose of the image being something nice for men to look at, then I really don't think that the problem is gone at all.

I'm happy that the're making the change but I worry that rather than saying "women are more than pretty objects that exist purely to satisfy men", all this move actually says is that the naked body is something to be ashamed of.

It's fantastic news. Time this kind of objectification was a thing of the past. Glad to see they have moved on, at last.

Hurray! I'm with mypoosmellsofroses - especially in something that claims (yes I know, but it does) to be a news paper, the page 3 pics just normalise attitudes that women exist for male pleasure only.

Tip of the iceberg, yes : but it is the tip (optimistic thoughts)!

Good news. Let's hope it's permanent.

Next, can we perhaps do something about the horrible misogynistic sleb magazines that escalate body insecurities by pointing and laughing at women's weight gain/loss, cellulite and 'wardrobe malfunctions'?

oh wait, that's women who read them

Great news!

If it means I can explain one day to baby DS that there used to be this grim feature in the sun where women were topless for men to look at on their lunch breaks but he will have no memory of it as a 'normal' thing, then I'm pretty happy, yes.

I'll celebrate when it becomes definite and permanent.
But it's a start :)

Never really got the fuss over this. Given the absolutely horrendous material that can be accessed online this day I never really saw what was wrong with a pretty bare breasted girl smiling

Why not just have a pretty girl smiling, why does anybody need to see her breasts?

It's the very innocuousness of P3 that's the issue for me. The fact that it is just a bare breasted woman and very bland in comparison to a lot of porn has made it easy for people to defend it as "harmless" "just a bit of fun" or even "a celebration of youth and freshness"
Having this huge image, so prominently, has been a drip feed for years, sending the message that women should be decorative, available and passive.
In an age where there are calls to educate children from an early age to the dangers of pornography, this muddies the waters considerably. So we try hard to get across the message that pornography is harmful, but the tits on page 3? Yeah, that's fine, that's "different" somehow.
Normalising this kind of "starter porn" makes it harder to deal with the rest of it.