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.
Do what you like - I'm not telling you to do anything and nobody on this thread is talking about banning page 3. If we can't discuss the wider context and implications of the choices we make then there's a whole raft of topics that we can't talk about at all because some woman somewhere will have 'chosen' to do it.
I make all sorts of choices which I consider to be 'unfeminist' - I'm sure most of us do - because we're all just muddling through in a system that was not set up with our best interests at heart. I'm interested in the politics around those choices - to what extent they are truly 'free', why we make the choices we do, what the impact of those choices is for us, for other women, for the whole of society.
The following is part of a post I wrote on another thread about the feminist theory section. I think it's relevant here:
While I would have preferred it if FWR had been left as it was, my reasoning for suggesting the theory section was that we could have a space to discuss issues from a feminist perspective without people taking things so personally - e.g. we could discuss the politics of hair removal without the inevitable derail to deal with all the - 'I shave and I'm a woman and it's my choice so how dare you criticise' - type posts (when in fact, probably quite a few of us both shave and want to examine the politics of doing so).
The specific problem I have with p3 is to do with public space. We can't all just do whatever we want in public space because we all have to share it and so our actions affect other people, yet somehow it's acceptable to have sexualised pictures of bare breasted women in a daily paper that is read on public transport, in pubs, cafes and workplaces, even though it makes a lot of women feel uncomfortable and intimidated. To say that only p3 models should get any say in the matter is ridiculous.