Beware, strumpets and reprobates—the femiternalists are back! Not content with slamming their stilettos down on strippers’ faces in Iceland, these especially noxious followers of the feminist faith want to get their killjoy claws into Page 3, the most intellectually stimulating page in UK tabloid The Sun.
This isn’t the first time feministing folk have tried to nag bare breasts off The Sun’s pages. Lefty ex-parliamentarian Claire Short led a particularly Purityrannical campaign to ban boobs from the paper back in the Eighties as part of a larger anti-porn purge. More recently, the ever-histrionic Laurie Penny derided the pulchritudinous page as “neoliberal social conditioning”, existing only for the purpose of keeping womynkynd firmly in thrall to the phallocracy.
Now, the torch of termagancy has been snatched by not one but two killjoys.
Firstly, Lucy Anne Holmes, who came to my attention when she announced her No More Page 3 campaign via The Independent:
As one of our change.org petition signatures says, ‘Boobs aren’t news’. Indeed, so why are they in the newspaper? Well, they are in the newspaper because in 1970 a group of men, in a male managed media, in a male run country decided to put them there. Possibly they didn’t think how women would feel about being represented like this, nor did it occur to them that women read newspapers. The thought process must have been ‘men like boobs, let’s put them in.’ It is quite incredible now that this happened really. But it did. And even more incredibly it still does.
The page 3 girl image is there for no other reason than the sexual gratification of men. She’s a sex object. But when figures range from 300,000 women being sexually assaulted and 60,000 raped each year, to 1 in 4 who have been sexually assaulted, is it wise to be repeatedly perpetuating a notion that women are sexual objects? When I heard the 1 in 4 statistic I thought it sounded too high. But then I thought about my own circle of female friends.
I myself was sexually assaulted in my 20’s. I stayed at a friend’s house after a party and woke up with a man touching me very intimately, and masturbating over me. I spoke to a friend about it, who then told me she’d been raped on a first date. Recently, I’ve been asking my friends outright for their stories; most have been sexually assaulted at least once. I think these figures hugely under estimate the scale of the problem.
From the article, and other media Holmes put out, I get the impression that her crusade is primarily rooted in her own hang-ups, with concerns of “social justice” being something of an afterthought; it shows in her lame attempts to link voluntary topless modelling with the sexual abuse inflicted on her and her own, her focus on her bodily insecurities in a vid she posted on YouTube, and her citing of those notorious “1 in 4” rape stats—the reliability of which are dubious, to say the least. Like similar moralistic meddlings spearheaded by the aggrieved and grieving, her campaign amounts to self-therapy disguised as social activism: a means of projecting and purging personal issues onto the public sphere…
…and what perkier piñatas to thrash than those of a sexually-secure Page 3 girl?
Mind you, at least sexual desire links harmless ogling and heinous violation, however tenuously. If nothing else, Holmes has a toe on the ground, which is more than can be said for Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, who links bashing one out in the workplace bog with bashing one’s missus into A&E:
Risking a backlash from tabloid readers, the international development minister said: ‘There is a real argument about what is OK in the public space.
‘If you are on the Tube you may find Page 3 is facing you and your young daughter and you may not want that to be a role model for her.
‘There is an army on the other side hurtling abuse. It’s not simply about equal pay. It’s about the constant drip, drip of women being sexualised in the public space [which] has a great bearing on attitudes and domestic violence,’ she told the Independent on Sunday.
‘When you know that one in four women experience domestic violence in their life, two women are killed each week by their partner or husband, there is a very long way to go.
–The Daily Mail
Still, both these bluestockings unwittingly affirm the reactionary attitudes they ostensibly pit themselves against. If there’s one thing that’ll get feminists and social conservatives in bed together, it’s a chance to scapegoat salacious media for all the ills of their respective worldviews. Notice how Holmes strokes the wrinkled cock of chivalry to muster male support:
Many fathers have signed the petition, alarmed by how disturbing this is for their daughters. But many fathers continue to buy and read The Sun, slowly but surely conditioning these daughters that they love, that they are sex objects. I spoke to the father of a young woman I know recently. “I hear you’ve started a campaign,” he said. “Yes,” I responded. “I won’t be signing it. I think there should be more tits in the paper,” he laughed. His daughter wants to be a glamour model. He doesn’t know yet. I think he’ll hate the thought of his ‘little girl’ being ogled in these photos and the violent comments of ‘yeah, I’d like to bang that’ that you so often hear. But judging by the comment he made to me, it is no surprise that his daughter is choosing this path.
White knights of Britain, lock up your daughters!
Yesterday’s finger-wagging church ladies may have traded their pews and pulpits for petitions and picket signs, but their desire to co-opt the lives and libidos of the unbelievers remains intact. Like their traditionalist counterpart, Mary Whitehouse, Holmes and Featherstone (and their fellow femiternalists) see themselves as the first and final arbiters of public morality, mistaking the customs of their tribe for some kind of universal law. Were the pair of them breeders, they’d be part of the wretched Mumsnet mob, using their kids as swords and shields in their war to nannify the nation.
All that said, it baffles me what the femiternalists—and the red-blooded, arse-scratching prole audience they decry—get so excited about. On the occasions I condescend to peek inside The Sun, I’m left cold by the selection of “stunners” on display: with the occasional exception, today’s Page 3 girls fit an identikit mould of aesthetic blandness reminiscent of the cast of your typical American teen drama…or Hollyoaks. To quote Martin Robbins’ take on FHM, present-day Page 3 strikes me as “a parade of near-identical Stepford wank subjects”.
Not at all like the old days of such saucy Sisterhood-slighters as Sam “Touch Me” Fox…
…Maria Whittaker…
…and Debbie Corrigan.
Mind you, it’s probably not such a great idea for me to glorify the past too much. After all, back then, The Sun also had the Page 7 Fella: the apex of matriarchal oppression!
Just thinking about it makes my Y chromosome want to curl up and cry in a corner…
EDIT (16/3/13): Republished at Street Carnage. Thanks, Jim!
~MRDA~
