BAN PAGE THREE - some of the reasons to sign the petition to get the bare boobs out of the Sun

I find it hard to express myself when asked what is wrong with page three? What isn’t?

It’s part of a wider problem of women being undercut as they express themselves in the media, of the increasing agency of women in the 20^th and 21^st centuries parodied and undercut by circumscribing a woman’s place as naked on camera amongst news she, in her naked state alluding to the privacy of the home she is supposedly allowed to leave in this liberal society, is unable to be part of.

In a way, a naked female body shown might encourage its celebration, but the important thing about the bodies in these photographs is that they are not ‘female’ in terms of the diversity of image that word should conjure up, but female in terms of the shape of men’s fantasies and photoshop skills. In the very moment of their nudity, the women who present naked femininity to the masses through the Sun, are clothed in symbolism and maximised and minimised in all the places that modern culture has come to view as appropriate.

There’s also a more theoretical (and alienating to a lot of people) argument lurking here which asks what the proximity is between fetishization and humiliation? Men celebrate these women in a very limited sense, in a sense that repetitively seeks the security of a familiar image, a shape that presents no challenges in what it looks like and thereby also in what it symbolizes. The nudity that is to be celebrated is moderated – it fits what has already been seen and is therefore acceptable. The editing studios of the Sun churn out images that tell men at once that it offers them multiple beauties  - look at the wide variety of women we have here for you to choose from, in fact you can vicariously have them all – but who are also all the same, symbolize some one thing, some particular security of counterpart to male identity. The women on these pages are intellectually undermined, not simply because their job is as unchallenging as removing clothes and pulling faces and poses, but because comment boxes around their photographs describe some supposedly complex theories that we are to assume could not possibly have come from the innards of these female shapes. We are invited to see the irony in the contrast between the pure visuality of the image of femininity represented and the complexity of internal working that would be required to arrive at the accompanying thought-statement. The implication is that these women are pure exteriority, pure object. They constitute nothing in themselves, from the inside out; they are generated from the outside in, expected to develop matching behavior for the image portrayed of them which is not of them as individuals but of them as a group of counterparts to male agency.

To be undressed in public is to be ridiculous. I found it very amusing to see that David Cameron was bursting out of his shirt at a recent dinner. He slipped, for a moment, outside of the decorum of his suited position, and into the realms of the unclothed. His public face became dislodged and in place we saw into the weakness of the ultimate privacy of the human body as he exposed his flesh to the world. One dresses appropriately for different occasions, nobody can deny the symbolic weight that clothing carries in a country full of school uniforms, labels such as ‘white collar workers’ and dress codes for just about everything. Why then does anybody try to deny that a dress code that says not only ‘wear nothing’ but also ‘act as a blank canvas for photoshop’ means something more than nothing. This dress code says ‘you are not fit to be seen by the public, yet you are to be seen and enjoyed by them’, it says ‘you should be ashamed of yourself’ but also ‘be proud of your shame’.

My opinion is that this is a violence to the totality of any female, to force their naked body, warped to the satisfaction of the male gaze, to circumscribe the rest of their being, to force them to regard their body as an economic good, a possession along with anything else that is only theirs until they sell it or if they can afford to keep it, to desensitize the male gaze to the radical challenge of the naked female body, and to filter female sexual desire through the bizarre lens of male eroticization.

It should be made incredibly clear that this is nothing AT ALL to do with men being allowed to find women attractive. This is an issue of economics and commodification. I would go so far as call it a male pathological problem, this desire to see a women in a weaker situation than oneself; she is naked while the viewer is safely clothed, publicized while the viewer can hide behind closed doors, posed in a sexually submissive manner. Attraction is natural, chemical drives within living organisms inspire a desire to reproduce, but not a desire to peep, to perv, to show so violently the cut-into-shape image of the female body that page three creates.

Women should be forging the narratives as writers, camera operators, editors etc, not acting as the stuff of dreams in front of the lens. They should be the object of verbs not objectified as inactive. The male gaze, in part inspired by the cultural myriad of oppression that the Sun is part of, is always watchful for women as they go about their business, undermining their agency with comments that suggest they have left the house for the gratification of those looks. We shouldn’t be reminded all the time of our presence as visual image, we should be allowed an internal monologue of our own volition as we walk down the streets, we should not be interrupted by cat calls or the cries of homosocial bonding – ‘she’s fit…she’s fat….I would…..’

It’s already selling one’s soul to work for News International, it’s unfair that women should have to sell their bodies as well. Banning page three is just one step in acknowledging that women should not be structured by men, that we own visual images of the feminine as much as any male gaze; that we have insides – brains, wombs, organs, thoughts – and outsides; that we are part of the world of the public, and as such also deserve our privacy; in short that we are people, we are real, and we are everywhere.

sign the petition to ban page three