Page three

[clemetteattlee]

So, I have signed the petition to lobby the Sun into finally getting rid of page 3 girls and posted a link to the petition on my Facebook page. Given that I post links to various different political and women's rights sites you'd think they wouldn't be surprised, but I have had someone accuse me of "being like the Taliban!"
For me this is a no-brainer and should be a small and obvious skirmish in the wider campaign for equality and respect yet I am amazed at how many people are keen to defend page three in the name of "freedom of speech."
Does anyone have any thoughts?

"The USA also has 12 times as many prisoners but only twice the population of Japan."

factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=816&catid=22&subcatid=147

Noone has yet answered why Japan has such low crime rate despite having a thriving porn and prostitution industry. And why the US has a lot of crime yet the US has criminalzied prositution and has very prudish views?

Not every choice a woman makes is necessarily a feminist one. Women make loads of choices which are bad for them, bad for other women or both. Feminism, being political, will critique those choices. To do otherwise, to say something is beyond criticism because a women chose to do it, is silencing and gets us nowhere.

I'm happy to see the above statement hasn't only peed me off. Sounds so bloody patronising. Next we'll be told to keep our clothes on, stop get men excited, or god forbid coming to climax, save outside of a loving, mutally fulfilling relationship.

Exactly MsAnn !

I think that Japan is sort of a special case among nations and cultures. It's both connected and isolated, and it has a very strong sense of tradition, yet a love of gadgets and fads. Good behaviour is something the Japanese think is very important, so their crime rate is very low. But then, once they decide that something is permissible, they're apt to do it to what we'd call crazy extremes. Hence the open pornography, or the way Japanese soldiers acted during WWII. No, there isn't much violence against women in Japan, but there have been a lot of stories about sexual harassment and women not being taken seriously in anything but a subservient role--basically Japanese men assume they're in charge to an extent we'd consider outrageous. So, the crime statistics say something, but there's a lot more going on.

So are you saying that open pornography does not necessarily lead to violence against women? That if we want to eradicate violence against women - or at least reduce it greatly - it is more complex than simply banning porn? I am not expressing a preference; simply trying to understand viewpoints.

"Not every choice a woman makes is necessarily a feminist one. Women make loads of choices which are bad for them, bad for other women or both. Feminism, being political, will critique those choices. To do otherwise, to say something is beyond criticism because a women chose to do it, is silencing and gets us nowhere."

The issue is not that every choice a woman makes must be a feminist choice, but that a woman must have the right to make any choice she wishes to make.

Well I wonder why so many women make the choice to pose for men, happy for them to leer at them regardless of how this affects other women, when men don't seem to want to pose for women with hardly any clothes on. I know there aren't the same avenues available for men to do this, and I also know a lot of women do not find a naked man particularly arousing. But even if there were more ways for men to do this, I think not many of them would make the choice to do so.

Page 3 ? It's just so naff isn't it ? it's really quite embarassing what a role it still has in our society, and people still so determined to keep it as a "British Institution".

Move on dinosaurs ! I never imagined a link with Nick Clegg and Jim Davidson, but there you go..

There definitely isn't. I remember when Playgirl came out in the UK (was that it's name??) and a girl in my college dorm got a copy. It provoked screeches of laughter but then we just all found it a bit sad. I remember thinking how sad the men were to degrade themselves like that and why couldn't they have some dignity and do what other men do and get a 'proper' job. But when women pose nude or topless it just seems to be something some women do as if they aren't better than that and no one seems to wonder why don't they get a 'proper' job. Like being ogled by men is all some women are good for.

I am rambling a bit I think.

HappyHalloween it is naff....that is exactly the word!

So are you saying that open pornography does not necessarily lead to violence against women? That if we want to eradicate violence against women - or at least reduce it greatly - it is more complex than simply banning porn?

IMO banning something isn't a magic solution to reducing crime. And sometimes it won't solve anything at all.

samurai Sex sells - but usually it's only the female body. Why is it women make the choice - is it because there's more opportunities? Would men do it - I don't think there is a large market for the male body.

I think if there was a bigger market for the men then some men would be happy to do it.

The sex industry isn't as one sided as most people think anyway. eg most people think most sex workers are female but a quick search on Adultwork's escort directory shows there are 10,000 male escorts and 19,000 female escorts in the UK. That means about 1 in 3 escorts are male (although most men do charge lower prices).

A slightly different topic but over 10 years ago Portugal legalized all drugs. For over 10 years Portugal hasn't sent a single person to prison for drug use. Now drug use and crime has plummeted in Portugal. Makes you think doesn't it?

(plenty sources for this with a quick Google search).

Compare to Colombia which has extremely strick anti-drug laws and even brought in the military to enforce them. As a result thousands of people have been killed and the underground drug industry is still booming. It seems the harder they try to stop people taking drugs the more violent things become.

IMO banning something isn't a magic solution to reducing crime. And sometimes it won't solve anything at all.

Frans, I don't think that many people on here will agree with you. Porn seems to be fairly widely frowned upon within certain feminist strands.

In any walk of life, for any problem, I always assume that someone else has tried/found a solution. Surely if we look at societies and cultures with lower instances of anything - violence, crime, littering - we can examine how they arrived at their solution, what they do and what they don't do. If - and I don't know if it's true - Japan has lower levels of violence against women, then surely we need to examine how they got there? And if porn isn't a problem for them, why isn't it?

samuraicindy - there's plenty of publications offline and online which regularly feature blokes in their nudey-pants. Cosmo has a centrefold section, you can buy calendars, etc etc. If you're not aware of it because you don't buy that kind of stuff is fair enough, but doesn't mean that it doesn't exist

Porn seems to be fairly widely frowned upon within certain feminist strands.

That seems to be the case (with the exception of those who call themselves "sex positive feminists").

But remember there are a lot of people both genders who aren't feminist.

WW I definitely don't buy that kind of stuff!! The only man I find attractive is my husband and the only one I have eyes for (sorry to be soppy!!!). That s interesting to know - I thought maybe that men weren't as tempted to go into nude modelling because they had more options open to them in society, but it is interesting that they still choose to do this.

rosebud yes it would be nice to see some sexy men naked in the paper, why not

Yes, indeed, why not? Except I'm still looking.....and not seeing any of those erect penises?? I'm seeing The Sun taking nearly every opportunity to get as much bare female flesh or lingerie-clad female flesh as possible on to each page yet.....how odd.......no male nakedness, no erect penises at all!!

Why is that I wonder? Oh, could it possibly be that it's actually nothing to do with "harmless fun" and everything to do with keeping men happy and women in thier place (which is, as everyone knows, to keep men happy)?

And, when discussing page three, the "we must be liberal and not ban porn" argument is irrelevant because it is in a DAILY NEWSPAPER which is on our newstands and read next to us on the bus and left lying around for children to look at whereas porn is for private consumption.

rosabud erect penises are per definitionem pornography, and therefore not page 3 material. P You won't spot a labia on page 3 either.

So erect nipples, the sign of arousal in women are OK and not pornography but erect penises are pornography? So why are aroused women not porngraphy but aroused men are? Bit of a double standard going on there I think.

I don't class page 3 as porn, despite hating it with a vengeance

it is objectifying shit that belongs back in the 1970's (along with Jimmy fucking Savile) but porn, to me, is moving images

I'd like to see some page 3 pics with inverted nipples. Or even flat nipples. Not ones that have had ice cubes applied to them to simulate sexual arousal for the ladz.

The Sun doesn't show erect penises because that would be classed as hardcore porn, but it doesn't show women's vaginas either so what's the problem?

But tbh I would like to see more black or Asian page 3 models, they seem to be dominantly white pale-skinned British women. Doesn't British society consider non-white women as model material?

It's The Sun. They don't consider women as anything but objects

It is not about model material, it is about wanking material.