The Future of “Page Three Girls”

Bitch Magazine investigates the latest attempt to say “whyyyyyyy are there randomly topless white women in The Sun every single day, not that breasts aren’t super-great?”

However, the latest ‘No More Page 3’ campaign, launched by U.K. feminist Lucy Holmes, seems to have captured the British public’s imagination in an unprecedented way. Her polite request to Dominic Monahan, editor of The Sun, to stop showing “the naked breasts of a young woman in your widely-read “family” newspaper” has gained 52,000 signatures and has sparked a flurry of support on Twitter, Facebook, and across the blogosphere. Both women and men are signing, with comments ranging from the concise — “Because women contribute to society in many ways that do not involve a man’s erection” to the poignant “Because I want my daughter growing up in a world that respects her for ALL she is, instead of treating her like meat”. Although the lack of diversity on Page 3 has largely gone unaddressed, it’s also worth mentioning that The Sun has always promoted the most prescriptive version of ‘sexiness’ imaginable — a white, slim, able-bodied, cisgendered young woman served up for male consumption. Of the thousands of women who have modelled for Page 3 since 1972, only four of them have been black.