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?

Light-hearted...... I think the 90s / 00s proliferation of big boobs pictures clearly captioned by men ("Jenny 42DD" etc) kept me in the wrong sized bra for years!!

Although I’m horrified by the easy access of online porn, it’s still not the same as a pair of naked breasts on the opening page of a national newspaper. I mean, you were confronted by the image even if you didn’t want to see it.

I think lads mags of the 1990s were just as bad, any female celebrity deemed vaguely attractive would be on the cover dressed in a bikini or a school girl outfit giving an interview where she would go on about how much she loved sex. At least we don’t have to see that on magazine stands any more (plus there are no magazines any more). I blame girl power.

I guess they would be called thirst traps now.

But...it's even easier to get hold of now, and moving, more choice, more violent....?

Do you see it at work? On the bus? In waiting rooms? Every garage?

I see men sat in their cars and vans hiding screens from windows, I see men getting fired because they access it at work. MP's watch it in the House of Commons. Very naive to think just because you don't have to hold up a paper in front of your face men aren't accessing increased material in public places from their phones.

I remember being in primary 1 and we were painting. There were old newspapers on the table (1982 so still black and white) to stop us getting paint everywhere. We turned one of the sheets over and there was a page 3 girl…much giggling and even more so when one of the girls used the red paint to colour in Sam Fox’s nipples.

It still makes me chuckle now.

Teacher was not impressed…I remember the poor girl getting a proper telling off.

Five years old being exposed to that in primary school. Times have changed but I think for the worse in terms of what other things kids could be exposed to these days….

Surely only fans now is far worse. What they do on cam for money, sleazy but accepted as normal

Yep fucked up. And if you scroll through netflix etc women aren't represented too different

I agree far worse now.
School kids and extreme porn. It's all online for kids to see not just a few breasts

Gosh.. didn't any of you sun bathe topless on your holidays abroad?
I remember being 18 in St Tropez and being top less for the first time as were 99% of the women.
If l was younger and firmer I'd still do it.. l see it all the time abroad.. l only stopped when l got to about age 40.
No one bats an eyelid.
Personally page 3 never bothered me.. l posed topless on a motorbike age 22 for a promotion.

Only they don't want anyone in their OWN family to do it, of course.

Much as I appreciate not having nipples in my face on paper in pubs etc I do think it's got far worse since the internet and we have just put a veneer on public life to keep women happy. Men still begrudge it of course anyway.

Now you have worse in that it is acceptable to see a young woman drugged to the point her eyes are rolling back in her head pretending to be a steam train. Over 1m likes with thousands upon thousands of comments from men saying what they would do to her/with that mouth etc. On pages like Sociaty and Fembase - hardly out there in terms of sexualised content, millions of subscribers. Passed off as completely normal and acceptable.

Some blokes at work used to have topless girl desk calendars - this was in an office, large corporate, less than 20 years ago!

Grim.

I remember them being on peanut packets in pubs

But can't you see that it normalised it so every female aged 12 and over became subjected to the fall out? You really think it was ok as you did it yourself?

Do you have DD?

I'm not exactly sure that they were wank fodder. Not regularly for most normal people anyway. Maybe for saddos or pervs. It was kind of at the stage where it was so normal for naked tits to be on page 3, that people didn't really bat an eyelid. Me and dh used to buy the sun, so did pils. I don't think anyone was wanking over it.

Also iirc, sometimes the actual full frontal boobs shot wasn't shown, the woman would be sideways or whatever. In that scenario, the amount of flesh shown is no different to all of the stuff in the daily mail these days - shots of loads of celebs in tiny bikinis etc.

And i think there was occasionally something like a "page 7 fella"? Can't remember the page but do remember passing a page like this relatively regularly.

At the time, it seemed like the right thing, to get rid of page 3. But unfortunately we are left with much worse. Internet porn and Instagram.

Some really fascinating insights here. I think for me, there was something really uncomfortable about the mainstream acceptance of images like this (let's face it, for the pleasure of men) accompanying news. I think it represented misogynistic culture and normalised sexist attitudes towards women.

I agree that the types of porn that are accessible today are just horrendous. I just pray that this doesn't become normalised in the same way. Although I'm aware that in some corners of society it already is to some degree.

We have the Sunday sport at work!

Makes the sun look tame in comparison

I do think sometimes about how messed up that seems now, and I'm glad it's gone. Sure, some people would go 'ugh, humourless feminist', but the normalising of this was a massive part of the narrative that women's bodies were public property to be ogled at and although there's a way to go, things have improved. For example, it's part of the societal process that means we now have far fewer gratuitous sex scenes in films, we seemed to have largely dropped the awful trope where the hunky hero kisses without permission the female lead who professes to hate him and of course she gives in because she fancied him all along! These things do matter because they are a drip-drip of a really harmful attitude towards women.

I took the kickboards off in our kitchen and found two Sun papers circa 1998. They just looked so sleazy

I remember constantly being whistled at and jeered by men on building-sites and in vans and cars, particularly when wearing school uniform or sports kit.

Having those images in the mainstream gave men licence to ogle and judge women. From the Sun to the Pirelli calendars.... Men were given the message they were entitled to look and comment and compare, and encouraged to think that this was what healthy, 'normal' men do. It was insidious.

And there was pressure on boys as well - it was ammunition for older men to 'tease' very young men in the workplace.