Why can't we just ban page three?

[Dragontamer]

Brilliant points raised by Clare Short in The Independent. To summarise:
You would think that the relentless sexism in the media would come up against 'media ethics'. However, Lord Leveson says that this topic goes beyond his remit. It is not ok to have lewd pictures of women on the office wall or before the watershed, why then are these images allowed in a widely circulated, national newspaper?

Having just had a daughter, I am anxious about what messages she will receive from this type of constant negative bombardment about women's bodies.

When Short has attempted to challenge this she has been bombarded by the snide remarks about her own body and criticised as being 'jealous'.

So, could this be a new campaign for mumsnet? Let me know your thoughts...

Oh so do you think page 3 is a sexualised image now? I thought your argument was it was just a bit of nudity.

And I have said about a trillion times why I want page 3 banned. And it has nothing to do with "a bit of nipple" and everything to do with the fact that a highly sexualised image of a nearly naked young woman appears every day in britain's best selling paper, and that children and young women and older women then have a bad time directly (being leered at) or indirectly (sitting next to someone who is perusing it). It is not a nice feeling being a pubescent girl sitting on a bus next to a man who is ogling page 3 in a drawn - out manner.

And if you are going to now say that it should be the responsibilty of children not to feel embarassed when they are confronted with adult sexuality then you are out of line.

nice summation SQ.

And Hmm saying other stuff is as bad is not to say there's no problem. It just means it's a big problem! which, if you want it solved, means you must do it piece by piece.

No SQ. Stop putting words in mouth. I'm responding to your repeated point about that.

Pointless to talk to you anyway as you don't understand why and how regulations can be misused and are vastly counter productive anyway as you are so fixated on the 'good stuff' you aren't even prepared to open your mind to the side effects and bad stuff.

24Hour, I don't disagree with that.

I just think you have to tackle the problem in the right way, to achieve a goal. Not to ban this or ban that. I don't think it actually solves anything.

hardcore porn is banned in daily newspapers.
do you think that is a bad thing.
given that you believe banning is a bad thing.

Oh fgs.

NO point. Really NO point.

Well it would solve the immediate problem of people feeling uncomfortable and creeped out by people perusing soft porn in public.

But you are right it wouldn't solve the deeper issues of what the female body signifies to people in general, and notions of it's worth and purpose, or the quite fixed ideas of a womans' place. But I think it would be a step in the right direction, all the same.

What 24hour said.

uncomfortable and creeped out = excellent way of putting it
and the people who feel that way are often female children

I agree that there are more sexualised pictures and images from music videos etc where nipples are covered. In the main, these are of women and objectify women. It's not either/or - I'm not keen on the objectification there too.

Equally, a paper could publish a topless or even a full frontal image that wasn't sexual (I'm thinking of the Naked Rambler as an example and any female equivalent) because the nudity would be the story, not the sexuality. A breast feeding or breast cancer story that showed a breast picture would not be sexual, it would be illustrative.

That's how I see the difference.

"Why is it so important to stop men desiring women?"

Page 3 and pornography across the spectrum from soft to hardcore has very little to do with real desire.

Two adults who desire each other and make love - fantastic. Dont know a feminist alive who has a problem with this. Porn is about the commodification of sex, turning women into objects and commercialising something beautiful. It is a million miles away from genuine, human desire.

Look lets get this clear shall we, the ban people argue cause and effect. Man looks at page three, then goes on to leer at any woman in his immediate vicinity. So how would not having page three stop men leering at women< uniformed young girls, women of all ages and sizes? The visual stimulus of a near naked woman is not the stimulus that provides the context of all women being available and open to ransom sexual encounters. Those messages are sent way before and are buried much deeper than page three. Removing page three would achieve nothing, in fact I doubt that any woman would notice that the absence of page three will reduce in any shape or form the way they feel whilst travelling on public transport and being leered at by men.

Cultural changes need wide spread cultural consensus and support that takes a long time to achieve. Thats what we are looking at here.

Have you ever been a schoolgirl with a man looking at page 3 and then looking at your breasts on the tube, leithlurker?

the presence of the picture in the paper makes it 10 x worse. Without it you can imagine that he is just gazing in that general direction, when he is looking from one to the other it is just much much worse.

And looking at page 3 does, i'm sure, turn a man's brain to thoughts of breasts and sex an young women without any clothes on in a way that an article on, say, the price of milk, doesn't.

Are we to believe that looking at page 3 does not make men think about breasts?

Considering that any man who wanted to, could be looking at the video of Britney spears in her sexually suggestive if not provocative school girls out fit on his phone or other mobile device I think I would be 100x more uncomfortable with that if I were a schoolgirl on a tube. Which leads me to ask sq why are you obsessed with page three< page three is so old tech it is hardly the most offensive thing that men could be looking at? If your clinging on to it's iconic status as a target for feminism I think again you need to re-examine what it is your trying to get rid of! Is it the message or the medium that the message is in? 20 years ago page three was relevant but now a man can watch anything he likes on his mobile phone including hardcore porn. He could be doing that whilst sitting next to or opposite a young woman, is that not worse? So you ban page three but still have music, hard core, soft core, graphic novels, advertising in and all around public spaces often with women wearing not much less than the page three models. I seriously think you need to let go of page three as a lost battle and put your efforts in to fighting the nature or should I say the root of the problem which has not and will not change, the way women are portrayer, the sexualised way that the female body is used, the status of women as objects not humans.

I'm not obsessed with page 3.
I simply dislike it intensely and would like to see the back of it.

I have never seen a man sitting on the tube looking at hardcore porn in any format. I have seen men every day looking at page 3 - the reason for this is that it is in a daily newspaper, the most popular one in the UK. i have only seen men looking at nuts type magazines a couple of times - it seems there is a general rule amongst men about what is acceptable in public and page 3 is fine and harder pictures / videos are not.

you haven't answered the question about "Have you ever been a schoolgirl with a man looking at page 3 and then looking at your breasts on the tube, leithlurker? " Has it happened to you? How did you feel? If it hasn't happened to you, can you remember back to when you were say 14 and how you would have felt with a man looking between nearly naked sexual images and your body?

I would say it takes very little for a man to think about breasts, seeing them I would agree is a good way to start him thinking about breasts. So what? Do you see many men having had the thought of breasts put in to their minds by any media, start salivating and rubbing themselves? I think not, so your assumption is that they start mentally having sex with any woman that they look at becouse of seeing a pair of tits in the paper. Now you may be right the majority of men may very well do exactly that but unless you can see inside the heads of men and know what they are thinking you can NEVER know for sure. But let's go with your idea that men do see women as sex objects and nothing else and the sight of breasts is all it needs for men to mentally entertain the thought of having sex with a complete stranger. Draw for me the line between fantasy, or daydreaming, and objectification. My line would not centre round if they had a copy of the sun in their hands, pockets, briefcase. It would be that a man would assume by the fact that they wanted to have sex with a strange woman that he could. As someone else said to fantasise about having sex with a fully willing and actively participating partner is different from thing than staring at a women obviousy salivating and rubbing his thighes.

Are you saying that women and girls do not know when they are being leered at?
Really?
Are you saying that if a man is looking at page 3 and then the chest of the girl sitting next to him, and then the paper, and then her chest, and pressing his leg up against her, that if she feels that he is leering at her she is likely to be wrong?
Really?

And you still haven't said how you have felt when this has happened to you. When you were a girl you must have had some kind of unwelcome attention - how did it make you feel? The feelings are generally embarrassment, confusion, fear, anger, intimidation, upset. What feelings did you feel?

I did not answer you as I supposed you would have remembered that I am a male, I have made no secrete of that in the many threads I have participated in. The fact that you have not observed men looking ta videos that contain sexually more explicit material whilst in public is no kind of indication that they do not. Indeed it is probably much easier to look at a small handheld device with headphones attached unobtrusively than it is to look at a paper which is a much more public thing to do given the size of the page and the sound of the pages being turned. We also seem to be focused on public transport but any public space, park, courtyard, beach, offers much more personal space for those who want to use mobile devices to view their choice privately with out anyone else knowing what it is they are looking at. If we are only saying that it is the medium of the printed page that turns men in to leering and ogling beasts, I think you need to go back to basics

you need to understand that by having P3, the implication is that this is generally acceptable.
which in turn is NOT ok.

whereas looking at a "small handheld device with headphones attached unobtrusively" by definition implies that the weirdo person watching handheld device knows that this in a generally unacceptable activity.

Understand now?

Oh right so actually you have no idea how it feels to be a 9yo girl on a bus next to a man ogling page 3, or a 14 year old girl who is being eyed up by a man who is also looking at that page on the paper.

If someone is looking at something and no-one else can see it then that's different to someone looking at something and everyone can see it. A 9yo is not going to feel upset at sitting next to someone minding their own business with a device that they can't see, are they.

I mean seriously if you are a bloke, how can you possibly have any idea how these things make girls and women feel?

What a joke.

Like men are usually shocked to hear at the level of casual sexual harrassment the average woman experiences in the UK in her lifetime. Yeah well newsflash of course they aren't doing it to you, or when they think it might cause trouble. I bet most young teenage boys would feel pretty terrified if a burly man was looking at a gay porn mag on the tube and looking lasciviously at the young man's groin, bum, thighs etc. That would be unacceptabe. But when it's page 3 and a yougn teenage girl on the receiving end it's fine - in fact it's more than fine it's a bloody institution.

Nigeella, why cross out the word weirdo that's obviously what you feel men who look at page 3 are? Weirdo or not you are right that we have made the women s bodies sexualised and commercialised. Society has promoted the idea that women are nothing more than bits of meet to be judged by how attractive they are, or how available they are. Weirdos and others do not need page three to get that message loud and clear that women are sex objects, it is all around is in every facet of our culture and society. For you to say that we should only be banning things that others can see as opposed to things that are unobtrusive but perhaps much more exploitative makes no sense. You would by that logic ban page three but leave the massive billboards of women in underwear selling cars, or pepsi? My argument for those that need reminded is that dismantling the problem is about hearts and minds. The same hearts and minds that will baulk at a ban because fundamentally humans hate to be told what to do.

Sq shall I tell you of me the rape survivor, my sister who was abused by a starnger. Would you care for the details of how a man forced me to touch his penis in a gents toilet, or the fact that as a result of a pretty obvious disability I have been starred at all my life. Or will I just leave you to make stupid and crass assumptions as well as ignorant ant ranting posts about a problem you want to solve by fundamentally ignoring the cause.