As a child growing up in Britain, your first understanding that nudity was something naughty often came from your first glimpse of Page 3 of The Sun newspaper.
Seeing a discarded paper with a picture of a smiling young woman baring her breasts was both shocking and exciting. The reaction of your mother or grandmother signified that this was something essentially bad.
Instinctively, you just knew that you shouldn’t really be looking at this woman’s breasts. Old men in builders’ cafes should be looking at them—for decades there appeared to be an unspoken rule that those sorts of men had special dispensation from the usual societal rules of decency and gender equality.
Just a handful of feminists railed against it back then.
As you got older, your reaction remained shock and perhaps excitement but a sense of bafflement, surrealism, distaste and despair crept in that this relic of yesteryear with its unreconstructed male-focused sensibilities was still present on a daily basis in Britain’s bestselling newspaper.
A new wave of feminism emerged determined to put an end to Page 3. No longer did old men and builders feel secure lingering on the third page, they began looking over their shoulders and feeling grubby.
This sense of shame or guilt at admiring the female body in states of undress has not reached Trinidad yet. Everywhere you go, pictures of scantily-clad buxom girls wearing tiny shorts bearing the names of beers are unavoidable. Nobody bats an eyelid, it’s not an issue.
As far as I’m aware, the T&T Guardian used to have a page devoted to pretty girls with no context other than that they were pretty. I even heard talk that some parties wanted that regular feature restored. These days, that’s called objectification.
Personally, I’m not against objectification. As long as all people and things are equally objectified I see no problem. I’m an anthropologist of the material culture variety. Things are there to be looked at and people are part of the material world. Objectification as a word has become loaded with negative connotations but let’s not kid ourselves, some humans love to be objectified: Page 3 girls, for example.
But a newspaper purporting to be reporting national news and sport is clearly not the forum for naked, smiling women. It’s weird and demeaning, and because there are no pictures of naked male models it is clearly sexist.
The Sun newspaper and its owner Rupert Murdoch finally woke up to that fact this week and banned Page 3 forthwith. A victory for the feminist campaign and a sign that even longstanding bastions of sexism are capable of being forced to change.
But is this a victory or a defeat for the women who modelled for Page 3? And why am I not seeing any part of the feminists’ campaign talking about alternative career paths for the models?
It seems to me that to remove Page 3 and other forms of topless modelling removes a form of employment or economic opportunity for particular types of women, just as getting rid of promo girls or cheerleader work in Trinidad would take away a revenue stream from young women, often students, trying to earn money from their physical appearance.
You might argue that Carib girls and topless models are different things but in Britain they would fall under the same category: sex objects premised on men’s pleasure.
The most obvious social group affected by banning topless glamour modelling is the uneducated young woman who leaves school at 16 with little academic or vocational prospects but has the ability and desire to do topless modelling.
I asked a friend what other career would a girl like that do and she said: “Page 3 is not a career; she could work in a store.”
But why should a woman who likes doing topless modelling work in a shop her whole life earning far less money and having far less of an enjoyable life? Page 3 girls aren’t forced into modelling, their parents usually support and encourage them and the Sun’s photographer is a woman.
It’s not just working-class women with no prospects. An ex-girlfriend of mine did topless modelling in Liverpool to save up enough money to move to London and fund her second degree. Her explanation, “I saw it as exploiting men’s stupidity by using what I had.”
Feminists are meant to support women from all walks of life and while going topless may not be an empowering career to a middle-class Oxbridge-educated mindset, some women do find it empowering and a platform to better themselves economically.
It’s a complex issue but I see a hypocrisy in the feminist stance which transcends gender and speaks to class.
Take boxing as a (predominantly) male comparison: a brutally-violent sport which society could find many grounds upon which to call for it to be banned. I couldn’t legitimately, consciously or morally defend boxing (or Page 3) but given that banning it would remove an outlet for young men born into poverty who can’t do maths or study law at Harvard but can use their fists (like Page 3 girls can use their breasts) I couldn’t consciously argue for banning it either, unless I was able to suggest a better alternative.