Page 3 girls - seriously wtf

[RedPringleGirl]

Was just thinking about this the other day. The very notion of the days news being presented with a splashing of wank fodder for want of a better phrase.

I mean, I know we're talking about the Sun newspaper so 'news' might be a bit of a generous term. But still. It was really fucked up don't you think?

Oh, yes we all had to put up with it, in the workplace, everywhere.
If you challenged it? You were a prude. A humourless feminist.

Agree - it was awful, and good that we've changed. Porn is however, far more available now, and far more graphic. So has there really been that much progress.

What always got me was the fake caption used to try to make the girl in question look a bit more switched on. ‘Carly, 21, would like us to switch to the Euro as she thinks it will be better for the economy’

It's still a problem, but the issue was how mainstream the objectification of women was. How harassment was an every day experience for girls and women. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen now, but it was endemic then.

Remember what happened to MPs like Clare Short who tries to ban it never mind raise the age from 16 to 18?

This is so true

I remember back to Clare Short introducing an unsuccessful bill to ban page 3 to a disgusting, braying parliament with MPs joking that she’d ‘won the booby prize’. Glad things have moved on to an extent…

We haven’t solved the problem though have we? It’s ALL over the internet instead.

And actually - the Daily Mail - and others - regularly show "celebs" wearing not much more than a P3 girl would. Swimsuit pics of Katie Price, Amanda Holden Kim Kardashian, various models are on every "showbiz" page. The recent Katie Price one showed her in tattoos, a bikini top that covered her nipples and not much more and a tiny skirt.
Sadly I can't say we can really congratulate ourselves. (But at least it's not pinned up on office walls!)

When blokes reproduce those images and put them up on the walls at work, there will be an equivalent problem.
This was one of many difficult and bitter campaigns for women.

It seems unbelievable that only 21 years ago, it wa legal for school girls to be photographed and published in a atonal newspaper topless. So basically, their own teachers could see these photographs.

Of its time. 🙂

And did.
Plus there were countdowns to 16th birthdays, gradually revealing more.
Schoolgirls in uniform, opening their shirts.

It actually seems unbelievable now, but seemed normal growing up with it. Just shows how societal attitudes/ cognitive dissonance affect us so much. I wonder what we’ll look back at in 20 years time and be surprised it was allowed.

Military personnel often had soft porn inside fighter jets and tanks while stationed away from home. They were otherwise known as 'pin-up girls'. I guess by today's standards, they were 'fucked up' aswell.

Bizarrely I was thinking about this a couple of days ago too

So many young girls age 16 were doing page 3

Crazy really that it was so normal

And that if your DD was in it every bloody person could know and buy a copy

I can't believe how it was all so normal back then. I used to have a Saturday job in Woolworths and they stuck the pages of Sam Fox and Maria Whittaker on the stock room walls for anyone to see, and it was considered acceptable. I'm sure there was a countdown in the paper to one of them being 16 and old enough to pose topless.

I remember there was a short lived "page 7 fella" where they had a photo of an oiled up topless man in jeans with the button undone, as if that was somehow equivalent to a topless teenage woman.

When I look back there was also a huge amount of low level sexual harassment back then, but anyone who dared to challenge it was deemed a prude.

Bloody hell, I just googled and the last Page 3 was in 2015!

You're right, OP, it's shocking. And yet at the same time it feels strangely innocent (wrong word, can't think of a better one) compared with what is available at the click of a button today. The end of page 3, welcome though it was, has not seen an end to the exploitation of women's bodies.

BTW I remember doing painting at primary school on a table covered in old newspapers which no-one had bothered to check for inappropriate photos 😱

I was actually thinking about this a few days ago. I remember doing my journalism degree and writing an article for homework called "New not Boobs" which at the time was perceived as fairly extreme feminism.

I had to see it every day as my mothers boyfriend bought the Sun daily so it was in the house growing up.

sorry, "News* not Boobs"

I can remember cans of Tennants lager had topless women on as well.

I can remember them doing a vote for which was the *Best-Natural boobs or implants
It was awful, but looking back, it does seem v innocent compared to what we can see now with choking and anal sex and other horrific things. I’d still prefer to be back in those days

You don't see those things in daily newspapers, indicating a socially acceptable use of imagery.

Yes I remember those days - remember walking to school and past a car that had newspaper covering the windscreen on cold days and they always included the P3 model.

Remember sitting on the bus next to men gawping at it and P3 calendars in garages, offices, workplaces, lorry cabs.

When I first started work in transport, one of the drivers used to have a P3 t-shirt with a topless model on it! Plus sales reps would hand out topless calendars, diaries to our boss.

Remember when Big Brother and other reality TV shows started and if there was a young female, they would be coerced to do P3 or appear in Nuts, Zoo etc.

Also remember when The Sun ran a report on what made the perfect breast with pictures of tape measures from the nipple to the top quarter, bottom quarter of breast etc.

Oh yes and in pubs when you bought a pack of nuts, it had a topless woman picture on the board behind which was eventually revealed. Some time in the 90s they covered them to became bikini girls.