Tag Archives: page 3

Alice Thomas

Opinion: Let’s look at the harm caused by Page 3

By Alice Thomas | Sun 25th January 2015 - 8:58 am

Given that Page 3 wasn’t in The Sun this week, it sure took up a lot of media space, especially among Lib Dems. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that loads of us want to wade into a fight that was framed as free speech and sexual expression vs gender equality and quality news reporting. But that’s not actually what’s going on at all: so here is a rundown of what Page 3 is, and why it’s harmful.

Page 3 is normalising objectification of women. The Sun makes printing nude women for the sole purpose of titillation in a national newspaper, which would otherwise be totally weird, normal. Images of nude women and breasts are perfectly normal and widely available in a sexual context (see, 80% of the internet), but a daily national newspaper is not the place for it, because it’s supposed to be for news. “Women have breasts” is pretty much the oldest story there is. Unless, like my mother, your breasts make it into the paper because they are testing the new mammogram machine at your local hospital they don’t need to be in there. If the Guardian decided to swap Polly Toynbee for a massive naked man next week, I’d find that equally inappropriate, because quality reporting is not about getting your rocks off (unless you have a particular fetish for bad photos of Ed Milliband).

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Caron Lindsay

Another Lib Dem website brilliantly topical error message – a pity it’s out of date so quickly

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 22nd January 2015 - 1:58 pm

I wish I had seen this yesterday.

Page 3 error message

 

A brilliant response to the debate over Page 3.

The party has been doing this a few times with its error messages recently. It’s very amusing and it also directs people to relevant policy on the website.

Unfortunately, as we’ve all found out, the Sun was trolling us all along. Former presidential candidate and new member of the Diversity Engagement Group Daisy Cooper said this about the Sun’s behaviour on Facebook:

So, pretending to stop Page 3 was just a bit of fun. Raising expectations then crushing them in a humiliating way. Classic abusive behaviour.

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Caron Lindsay

Lynne Featherstone: Good riddance to Page 3

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 20th January 2015 - 4:32 pm

There’s some interesting discussion on my social media timeline about  the Sun’s decision to stop printing clothes of topless women on Page 3. On one hand you have the male dominated group of people who think this is a dreadful infringement of liberty enacted by sinister feminists with An Agenda. Just you wait, they’ll be after your porn yet, they warn. They don’t like the fact that the No More Page 3 campaign started by Lucy-Anne Holmes and backed by more than 200,000 people has got what it wanted. It’s illiberal, they scream, for one group of people to interfere with the freedoms of others. That’s interesting. Presumably they would also be in favour of continuing to use the deeply racist language that was deemed acceptable when I was a child. Perhaps they’d oppose interfering in employers’ rights to send children up chimneys.

I just wonder how some of the men complaining about this decision if, every single day, there were pictures of naked men in a newspaper in a society where most of the positions of power were occupied by women who were never depicted in such a way. I don’t think they’d like it very much.

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Caron Lindsay

LibLink… Jo Swinson: Our children shouldn’t grow up thinking looks are the most important thing in life

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 31st July 2013 - 2:39 pm

I remember the genuine distress suffered by a teenage friend of ours. Her hair straighteners had broken and we don’t possess such implements. She was actually frightened and anxious at the thought of leaving the house and being seen by her peers with unstraightened, but perfectly tidy, hair. I had to source another set of straighteners before I could get her to school.

That, sadly, is the tip of the iceberg. The pressure on particularly girls to conform to a very narrow standard of beauty, dictated by the likes of Heat magazine and the pornography industry, is excruciating and can lead …

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Stephen Tall

Page 3 and the Tories: showing their modern, enlightened face

By Stephen Tall | Wed 26th June 2013 - 8:55 am

page 3 news in briefsPoliticsHome’s Paul Waugh reports the Tory distress at the axing of one of their favourite parts of The Sun:

the long-running News In Briefs section of Page 3 of the Sun (it’s been going since 2003) is, I can report, no more.

The section was missing from today’s paper, now under a new editor, and I understand there are no plans to resurrect it.

Several Tory MPs are already in mourning. The party’s popular ‘Breakfast Club’ of MPs (which numbers ministers as well as backbenchers) has a tradition whereby

…

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Stephen Tall

Majority of Lib Dems support ‘No more page 3’ campaign (but big differences between women/men’s views on issue)

By Stephen Tall | Wed 14th November 2012 - 7:50 am

Lib Dem Voice polled our members-only forum recently to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 550 party members have responded, and we’re publishing the full results.

44% of party members back ‘No more Page 3’

LDV asked: The ‘No more Page 3’ campaign was recently launched urging The Sun’s editor to drop pictures of topless women from the newspaper. What is your view?

    10% – I support the ‘No more page 3’ campaign and would also support government regulation (either an outright ban or restrictions on the sale of

…

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Posted in LDV Members poll | 30 Comments
David Thorpe

Opinion: Clegg was right to refuse to sign Page 3 protest

By David Thorpe | Fri 19th October 2012 - 4:22 pm

In common with most of you, when I saw that Nick Clegg was The Sun newspaper’s hero of the week – I grew worried that the path to populism which Clegg has embraced in recent months had led to a particularly illiberal precipice.

Clegg has, since the unveiling of the differentiation strategy come to resemble politically the drunken man wandering from bar to bar trying to get served one final time, as the Deputy Prime Minister lurches from one initiative to another, hoping to turn the alchemy of populism into the solid gold of popularity. I discuss this further here and here

But in declining to back the banning on Page 3 girls, Nick has taken a position which is

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Daisy Cooper MP

Opinion: Clegg’s cock-up over Page 3 – he should sign the “No More Page Three” petition now

By Daisy Cooper MP | Tue 16th October 2012 - 2:22 pm

In a BBC Radio 5 Live interview last week, Nick Clegg declined to back “the campaign to ban page 3 girls from the Sun,” on the grounds that the state should not dictate the content of newspapers. But the campaign in question- entitled Take the Bare Boobs Out of The Sun but better known by its twitter handle “@NoMorePage3” – ISN’T calling on the government to ban page 3. It is appealing directly to The Sun’s editor Dominic Mohan to stop printing it, on the basis that it simply isn’t appropriate to “show the naked breasts of young women in a widely read ‘family’ newspaper” for the purpose of the reader’s gratification.

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Paul Walter

The Sun’s “Hero of the week” is a straw man

By Paul Walter | Mon 15th October 2012 - 9:23 am

The Guardian reports:

Nick Clegg has declined to back the campaign to ban page 3 girls from the Sun, on the grounds that the state should not dictate the content of newspapers. In an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, the deputy prime minister said it would be “deeply illiberal” for the state to dictate what appears in newspapers…Clegg was asked by Shelagh Fogarty, the Radio 5 presenter, if he would support the page 3 ban during a live broadcast from Sheffield. “No, no, no,” he said. “I’ve got three little sons so I don’t have page 3

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Stephen Tall

Nick Clegg is The Sun’s Hero of the Week… again

By Stephen Tall | Sat 13th October 2012 - 12:20 pm

Perhaps it’s a pre-Leveson softening up exercise. Or perhaps we’ve activated a Lib Dem sleeper agent at the heart of Wapping. Whatever the explanation, Nick Clegg has been awarded the accolade — for the second time in three weeks — of being The Sun’s Hero of the Week. I’m not sure the reasons for which the paper has saluted him will do him many favours with all Lib Dems, but (simply in the spirit of sharing) here goes anyway…

The Sun, 12th October, 2012

Notwithstanding the fact that he was our Hero of the Week just three weeks

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Caron Lindsay

Featherstone and Crockart slam Page 3

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 19th September 2012 - 3:25 pm

A petition calling on the editor of the Sun to withdraw the Page 3 feature has gained more than 13,000 signatures in the last 2 days. I’m supporting this campaign because I strongly believe that a national newspaper showing half clothed women is a significant background note in the cultural melody which stops women from being treated as equal citizens.  How am I supposed to convince my daughter that she’s an equal member of society when she sees women portrayed as little more than window dressing for the express entertainment of men?

Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West Mike Crockart …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , and | 43 Comments
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