As much as I dislike lots of the things the Sun newspaper does in the name of journalism, and as much as I generally like Caroline Lucas, something about Ms Lucas wearing a 'No More Page 3' t-shirt in the House of Commons yesterday irked me.
As much as I dislike lots of the things the Sun newspaper does in the name of journalism, and as much as I generally like Caroline Lucas, something about Ms Lucas wearing a ‘No More Page 3’ t-shirt in the House of Commons yesterday irked me.
Not the wearing of the T-shirt as such, but rather what she said afterwards when she was rebuked for breaching House of Commons dress regulations.
Lucas referred to the ‘irony’ of being told her No More Page 3 t-shirt was offensive considering, presumably, that Page 3 is pretty offensive to some women.
Ok, fine so far, she has every right to feel ‘offended’ by what she reads in the press.
But she then called on the government to take action if the Sun’s editors do not stop publishing daily pictures of topless women on page three by the end of the year.
As a liberal, it’s here that I find I have a problem. Do I think Page 3 is silly and out of place in a newspaper that purports to be just that – a ‘news’ paper? Yes, absolutely.
Do I want the government to intervene in the editorial decisions of our papers based on what may or may not be ‘offensive’? No, I most certainly do not.
The argument that Lucas and others have started to use in proposing government regulation of the press over Page 3 is also strikingly similar to the old arguments used by social conservatives when they said that societal violence was a consequence of violence on television.
“A government-commissioned sexualisation of young people review found there is evidence that suggests a clear link between consumption of sexualised images, a tendency to view women as objects and the acceptance of aggressive attitudes and behaviour as the norm,” Lucas said.
In other words, we should censor the media because people may thoughtlessly act out what they see in the newspaper.
There is plenty of evidence that this just isn’t true. The widespread decline in violence in the West despite the boom in violent action films for one thing. Also, after over sixty years of research, the fact that evidence of the direct effect of the media on behaviour has not been clearly identified should at the very least act as a warning against state intervention in the press on that basis.
As David Gauntlett has pointed out, this approach to the media is a bit like
“…arguing that the solution to the number of road traffic accidents in Britain would be to lock away one famously poor driver from Cornwall; that is, a blinkered approach which tackles a real problem from the wrong end, involves cosmetic rather than relevant changes, and fails to look in any way at the ‘bigger picture'”.
A problem with the No More Page 3 campaign is the very premise it appears to be based on – that pornography is inherently sexist. In a sense this represents the triumph of authoritarian elitist feminism over its sex-positive counterpart.
It’s also surely about interpretation: who says a person looking at a picture of a half naked woman (or a man – remember page 7 which, tellingly, was dropped because it wasn’t very popular?) is ‘objectifying’ that person? If looking at a half naked woman does constitute objectification, does this mean that any man who finds a woman attractive based purely on what she looks like is a raging sexist?
Sorry, but I don’t buy it (in both senses of the word). And neither should you, if you don’t like the Sun newspaper that is. Don’t buy it. It’s really that simple.
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32 Responses to “The problem with No More Page 3: Right on authoritarianism is still authoritarianism”
James Appleton
I found it a little strange that Caroline Lucas talked about the government legislating if necessary. I agree that it shouldn’t, but if you actually pay some attention to the campaign itself this is not at all what it’s about. In fact it emphasises that all it wants to do is ‘very nicely’ encourage Dominic Mohan to voluntarily remove Page 3 from The S*n. This isn’t about authoritarianism.
Also you write: “A problem with the No More Page 3 campaign is the very premise it appears to be based on – that pornography is inherently sexist.” This is patently false, and again the organisers of the campaign have repeatedly said that this is not a campaign against pornography. It is a campaign against naked pictures of women appearing the in the news section of a national newspaper alongside News In Briefs, which definitely IS sexist. As their regularly used hashtag says, #BoobsAreNotNews.
At least do a little reading about the campaign before mouthing off about it.
HerbyAttitude
Lefty boy always pretends that women’s demand to be considered as fully human as men, is a bougeois deviation. That way, he can carry on being a sexist creep while being ideologically sound.
robertcp
You are entitled to your opinion.
Clare in the community
Might have known this was written by a bloke. Completely missed the point. I thought the world had moved on from the days of Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall, but I can only assume that James Bloodworth respects their behaviour as ‘freedom of expression’.
HerbyAttitude
“the smut of page 3 only exists because of the guilt ridden sexualisation of nudity in our culture.”
Not quite. If it were only about the sexualisation of nudity, then we’d have Page 3 boys as well as Page 3 girls.
If you ignore the fact that it is only women who are naked with come-hither looks on their faces – IE in deliberately sexually suggestive poses – then you are ignoring the source of the objection to it and pretending that the objection is some kind of prudishness or objection to the human body, rather than a political objection based on women’s lower status than that of men, which is underpinned by the designation of women as the sex caste.
People don’t object to nakedness per se, they object to the objectification of women in a national daily ubiquitous newspaper. Here’s a great example of a woman doing nakedness on her own terms, not in order to give men a boner or remind them that women are there to be assessed and approved of or not by them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c7-nHHZ86o