Crockart and Featherstone sign No More Page 3 letter to Sun editor

The success of the No More Page 3 campaign continues with the petition having crossed the 40,000 signature milestone last night.

The organisers have now drafted a letter to the Sun editor Dominic Mohan for MPs to sign.

Dear Dominic Mohan,

We write to lend our support to the No More Page 3 Campaign. As MPs our role is to serve the people, and we cannot remain silent in the presence of a page that limits and misrepresents over half the population.

The largest female image in our most widely-read newspaper is of a semi-naked young woman. She is there purely for the sexual gratification of men. This is unacceptable.We want to live in a society where the most widely-read newspaper is one that respects women. Instead, The Sun publishes Page 3, which reduces women to objects. It reduces men to objectifiers. And it reduces this country to one that upholds 1970s sexist values.

We’re better than this.

Please remove these damaging pictures from your newspaper.

Yours sincerely,

Credit where it's due, I am chuffed that my local Labour MP Graeme Morrice has signed.

Liberal Democrats Mike Crockart and Lynne Featherstone have also added their names. Mike did so via Twitter last night, calling the feature an "indefensible anachronism."

That leaves 55 Liberal Democrat MPs, not to mention AMs, MSPs, GLAMs and MEPs who may not have heard of this yet - so over to you to persuade them if you agree this is a good idea.

I realise that many of you will have had better things to do on a Friday night, but on Newsnight, Harriet Harman debated the issue with Neil Wallis, a former deputy editor of the Sun. Talking about indefensible anachronisms, he basically said that there were plenty real women out there who supported page 3. What does that make Harriet, I and its many opponents then?

Caroline Criado-Perez has written an article for the Huffington Post which outlines the abuse that women who oppose Page 3 have taken:

The most common tactic deployed by those who disagree with the campaign is to try to undermine the position from which we object. This takes a number of forms, the most regular being to suggest that we speak from a position of "envy", "jealousy" and "insecurity". We are "bitter", "self-obsessed", "pitying" and, strangely, "vain", because we are "ugly", "flat-chested", "older", "less pert", and, almost inevitably, "lesbians". These attacks on our looks are closely followed by comments which dismiss our arguments and evidence as "nagging", "whining" and "moaning" - undermining tactics which are linked with the next most popular approach, which is to call us "immature", "pathetic", "little girls" and patronise us by addressing us as "dear".

She also points to a 2009 study which suggests that there could be a link between things like Page 3 and domestic violence.

Furthermore, while a direct causal link is impossible to prove until we have complete transcripts of everyone's brains, charities that specialize in domestic violence, such as The Freedom Programme and End Violence Against Women (EVAW) both consider the objectification of women in the media to be a considerable contributory factor towards violence against women. They cite a number of independent investigations, one of the most compelling being a 2009 Princeton study which scanned the brains of heterosexual men looking at sexualized images of women in bikinis. The areas of their brains that lit up were those that light up when we anticipate using tools; these women were responded to as objects to be used. Small wonder then, that the American Psychological Association cites a range of studies demonstrating that when people view media that portrays women as sex objects, they become significantly more accepting of sexual harassment and interpersonal violence.

Last week, my article asking politely that men don't read their pornography in the public space, which was republished on the New Statesman, attracted some pretty insulting comments. Even when I put it up on Facebook, I was called bonkers, militant and a moron - by Liberal Democrats, for goodness sake. The abuse I've taken over this issue makes the cybernats look like a bunch of cuddly teddy bears.

The point that was made time and time again was that women read 50 Shades of Grey, so why is it a problem. Really? There are all sorts of novels, from Jackie Collins to the Stieg Larsson trilogy which outline some pretty graphic and often abusive sexual encounters. The thing is, if someone's reading them on in public all you can see is words on a page. From a distance, this blog post looks exactly the same as a page from Mark Pack and Ed Maxfield's book, 101 ways to win an election. You can't tell what's being read.

However, if I filled the entire space with a picture of an almost completely nude woman, you'd be able to see it a long way away. Why shouldn't I ask people to be a bit more considerate about what they do in the public space?

If you agree with the No to Page 3 campaign and haven't yet signed the petition, please do so here. I was taken by something Mike Crockart said on Twitter this morning - that for his No to Nuisance Calls campaign, 7000 signed up from a newspaper cutting, while 5000 signed up online. I wonder if the next step is to get paper copies into coffee mornings, workplaces or whatever. Maybe person to person contact would have even more success. 40,000 online signatures in 3 weeks is pretty outstanding, but by getting out there into our communities and asking people we know, our colleagues, friends and families, we will inevitably reach more people.

#nomorepage3's Lucy Anne Holmes interviewed on Scotland Tonight

Do you know, I feel a bit like Cilla Black? You can hardly have failed to know, courtesy of the big box in the sidebar, that I'm supporting a new grassroots campaign which aims to get the editor of the Sun to pull the Page 3 feature. As I was writing this round up post yesterday, 2000 signatures were added. That made 6,000 in 24 hours and there have been more since. We're now just over 2000 away from 20,000.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon, I sent a tweet to the excellent Scotland Tonight (which whips the backside of Newsnight Scotland by a long way) asking if they were planning on covering the No to Page 3 campaign. The rest, as they say, is history. A great match facilitated by me.

Lucy Anne Holmes, who started the petition off, was interviewed alongside Martel Maxwell,a writer and journalist who worked for the Sun for 10 years. You can see the whole thing here from about 20 minutes in.

Lucy played an absolute blinder. Yes, she was a bit nervous, but she was passionate and articulate and generally awesome. These are just a few of the things she had to say.

"We're appealing for the Sun editor to represent women with respect, like he represents men."

"These papers aren't bought under the counter. They are everywhere in our society. Page 3 makes the blatant objectification of women ok and a bit funny."

"There are plenty of places men can see breasts. I don't think that this sort of imagery should be in a family paper. The paper has men dressed going about their business, running the world and doing all sorts of good things and they see this massive image of a woman in her pants doing nothing. That's really powerful. It puts women in a limited place in society." 

"I actually think it's very interesting how people say "look at the tits on that." She become a that, a object dehumanised. When we start dehumaising people, that's when bad things happen, from the leering to the feeling entitled to the body because it's dehumanised."

"Men don't need to see nipples to read the news."

She cited the example one signatory gave. You might not buy the Sun, in the same way you'd never dream of owning a slave in those days - but that doesn't stop you campaigning against the idea of slavery.

It made me a bit sad for Martel Maxwell to be building up how the Page 3 models are adored by men when they go out to clubs. Hmmm. Do I want to be adored and given presents and patronised and bought drinks by men in clubs, or be seen as some sort of trophy,  or do I want to be treated like an equal and taken seriously and have genuine power and influence? Tough question, not.

While I've been writing this post there have been 1300 signatures on the petition. Add yours here. Follow @nomorepage3 on Twitter and keep in touch with them on Facebook.

No more Page 3 petition flies past 10,000 signatures - advertisers' boycott planned

Last week when I wrote about why I support the No More Page 3 campaign, the petition started by Lucy Holmes only had around 1700 signatures. Now there's not far off 12,000, with 2,000 of them being added in the last 16 hours.

The campaign is taking off now. Lucy Holmes has featured in the Guardian, was on Radio Leicester this morning and will, hopefully, as a result, attract more national coverage.

I hope that there will be efforts to get more signatures at all of the Party Conferences coming up. It's not a party political campaign, but there are people there who are likely to be motivated to sign.

I thought I'd do a quick round up of some fabulous articles and blog posts I've read on the subject.

First of all, Deborah Orr in the Guardian says Page 3 is the tip of the iceberg of misogyny.

Context is important. The Sun is packed with news about successful men – sportsmen, politicians, businessmen, war heroes. For some of the far less successful men – reading these exploits – it must be a comfort to be reminded so graphically that while they themselves are not movers and shakers, they are at least not women, not just a couple of mounds of flesh on a body. Their gender is something they have in common with the men of whom they read. Women's only contribution, in Sun world, is to look pretty and prompt a penis-twitch.

Surely Page 3 caters only for men who don't have relaxed, healthy, mature relationships with women. I don't mean just sexual relationships, though that is a given. Can men who need a fix of tit each day really have healthy relationships with their mothers, sisters, daughters, let alone female colleagues or any possible female friends? Page 3 tells these men, very clearly, that their misogyny is OK, something they don't have to question or change in themselves, just part of being a man.

I might have known author Keris Stainton would have been one of the first people to sign up to the petition. She wrote way back on 5 September how the feature affected her as she was growing up:

When I started writing this post, I googled Maria Whittaker because I remembered her being the Page 3 Girl I most wanted to look like (the women with the unfeasibly large boobs were always my favourites, because I had unfeasibly large boobs – or, at least, I thought I did – so they gave me hope) and I learned that she made her Page 3 debut in 1985 when she was 16. I stared at that for a long time, blinking. She was 16. She was in a national newspaper, topless, for men to drool over and say “Look at the tits on that.” That’s what she was there for. There’s no possible other interpretation. (Is there?) A sixteen year old. In a newspaper. For the sole purpose of sexual objectification.

Tillyjean at For What it's Worth touches on something I had raised in my blog post - the dangerous sense of entitlement that men have towards women and how that's fuelled by things like page 3.

Furthermore, it gives men an entitlement to women that is, frankly, dangerous. Suggest that there should be no more Page 3, and you will inevitably have men say “you can’t rob me of my daily tits” or something similar. As if a man has a right to look at a woman’s breasts. There is no such right. They are not yours. They are the woman in question’s, and while she may well have opted to show them to you, this gives you no more right to them than if she hadn’t. According to government statistics, 300,000 women a year are sexually assaulted, and 60,000 are raped. Is it really harmless to put forward the idea that women exist for the sexual pleasure of men, and that this is a thing that men are entitled to, given that context?

Hayley Devlin is a friend of Lucy Holmes' and is helping with the campaign. Her own blog is The Hayley Diaries and she did this guest post, A Breastside Story,  for London Feminist.

I’m not even entirely sure what’s worse, being a girl and having Page 3 in your face every day making you question your own womanhood or having Page 3 in the face of young boys every day and have them grow up to, perhaps subconsciously, see women as little more than objects of sexual desire.

When I think about, is it really that much of a surprise that 98% of the boys I come across would rather chat to my chest than to face, whether I have the girls on show or not? When from a young age, and long before they start using Google for more sordid searches, they are being presented with a nice, very pretty, half naked lady on a daily basis?!

Over at Talatyaq, the author ponders how to explain the existence of page 3 to her hypothetical children.

Perhaps I would spend some time creating an elaborate, potentially newsworthy, story about why this woman appears to have lost her clothes in between questionable journalism on immigration and cringeworthy headlines about politicians. If it was just bad journalism, I’d let it be. I’m not a fan, but I wouldn’t question its existence. But it’s not bad journalism, It’s an entire page spread, that could actually be for, well, news,  instead being used to objectify a woman.

And, finally, the blog that started it all off. Lucy Holmes' original blog at Bea magazine. That mirrors my own experience of being told not to nurse my baby in a tea room where they had the Sun available for customers to read.

Then I thought back to numerous conversations I’ve had with various breastfeeding friends about the weird stigma surrounding breastfeeding. How is it that we live in a society which makes women feel uncomfortable breast feeding in public but is happy to show the bare breasts of teenagers in it’s biggest selling newspaper?

It's great that this campaign is getting people talking about page 3 and maybe thinking again about why it's really not a good thing. But won't the Sun just ignore it? Well, they might. But if it looks like they might lose money, they might be prepared to think again. That's why the next stage, according to the No More Page 3 Facebook page, is a boycott of the Sun's biggest advertisers for one week. I'm not sure sure about tackling all of them at once. It might actually be a better idea to take one or two a week for several weeks. I mean, if you're used to shopping in supermarkets, boycotting all of them at once might just be too difficult. It might increase participation over a longer period. Anyway, here's what they say about it:

We are inviting supporters to refrain from spending their money with The Sun’s biggest advertisers, Tesco, Morrison, Sainsbury's, Asda, Argos, DFS, for one week. Oct, 29th Oct-4thNov. We will be bigging this up more and more...oh yes, indeed, but for now please let this information wedge itself in your brains so you can think of alternative big shop arrangements oh and please, please SPREAD THE WORD!!!!

Let's hope this campaign is the one  which finally shames the Sun into ending this deeply unpleasant feature. If you haven't yet signed, there's a great big box in the right hand side bar which will take you straight to the petition, or you can simply click here. And in the time it's taken me to write this post, 2000 signatures have been gained. Amazing stuff.

The Sun's Page 3 has seriously outstayed its welcome

Way back in the mists of time, one of the first debates I ever attended at university was on the subject "This House would ban page 3." Clare Short came all the way to Aberdeen to speak in favour of the motion that eventually won the support of the majority in the audience. I can't, however, still believe that after all this time, a whole quarter of a century, we are still discussing the existence of Page 3. Why in this day and age is it still there?

In those days I would have supported a ban. These days, I wouldn't because I realise that the Government starts interfering with the content of newspapers that I don't like, they'll do the same with content that I do like. Freedom of expression has to be closely protected.

That said, I have every right to campaign against things that I don't like. That's why I've signed up to a new No more Page 3 campaign. Now, this isn't addressed to Maria Miller, the new Culture Secretary. It's addressed to Dominic Mohan, the editor of the Sun.

The petition, started by Lucy Holmes, says this:

We are asking Dominic Mohan to drop the bare boobs from The Sun newspaper.

We are asking very nicely.

Please, Dominic.

No More Page 3.

George Alagiah doesn’t say, ‘And now let’s look at Courtney, 21, from Warrington’s bare breasts,’ in the middle of the 6 O’ Clock News, does he, Dominic?

Philip and Holly don’t flash up pictures of Danni, 19, from Plymouth, in just her pants and a necklace, on This Morning, do they, Dominic?

No, they don’t.

There would be an outcry.

And you shouldn’t show the naked breasts of young women in your widely read ‘family’ newspaper either.

Consider this a long overdue outcry.

Dominic, stop showing topless pictures of young women in Britain’s most widely read newspaper, stop conditioning your readers to view women as sex objects.

Enough is enough.

When my daughter was 4 months old, I was having a cup of tea in the local tea room in the Nottinghamshire village of Edwinstowe. I was shocked when the manager, a woman, believe it or not, shouted, actually shouted, from one corner of the room at me to stop nursing Anna. Why she should be bothered was a mystery to me given that all that was on show was the back of Anna's head. The reason, apparently, was that a man might come in and be offended. She saw no irony in the fact that there were much more in the way of exposed breasts  in the copies of the Sun she had displayed for her customers to read. My offence at that counted for nothing. A prime example of screwed up patriarchal nonsense if ever there was one.

Naturally, I refused, very politely, to stop nursing my baby. She needed to eat, after all. A big group of pensioners, both men and women, then came in and sat at the next table. They had no problems with what I was doing and chatted to me quite happily.

I find it extraordinary that 25 years after that debate with Clare Short, these pictures of half naked women are still appearing on a daily basis in what's supposedly a family newspaper. How am I supposed to tell my daughter she's an equal member of society when these other girls are treated like mere window dressing for the express entertainment of men?

You don't find men being set up in the same way. Ok, Heat magazine has its Torso of the Week feature, which has actually, believe it or not, included both David Cameron and Barack Obama. Men aren't ogled in quite the same way, though. There's no sense of ownership over them in the same way that women are treated. Coincidentally, I found this article on Facebook last night, which shows that merely the act of being female on an underground train can routinely lead to very scary harassment. The likes of Page 3 and other disrespectful and degrading portrayals of women as mere window dressing for men's enjoyment just adds to the culture where those sorts of attitude prevail.

A photo of a man's torso, though, isn't the equivalent of exposing a woman's breasts. We routinely see torsos exposed in public. For a man to truly understand what it feels like, he'd have to imagine a daily male backside or worse on prominent display in the tabloid press. In the olden days, when I was growing up, it was seen as perfectly fine for calendars showing half naked women to be pinned on the walls in work places. How much harder is it for a women working in a place with that sort of culture to be taken seriously? Page 3 is a significant background note in the cultural melody that keeps women from achieving genuine equality. The routine exposure in the name of entertainment, of a part of the body, unique to one gender, that is generally  kept covered, is not a mark of respect.

Slave to the Passions has only two posts so far - and I've linked to both of them. Author Rebecca Reilly-Cooper has a highly persuasive and forensic way of making her case. She writes about why she supports the latest campaign to get rid of page 3on both liberal and feminist grounds:

But this campaign is not attempting to restrict anybody’s right to free expression – it is notcalling for any form of legal censorship. What it is doing is exercising our own right of freedom of expression to call on the editor of The Sun, and ask him to exercise his right more responsibly. Just because you have a right to do something, doesn’t mean that you should do it, and doesn’t mean that others can’t ask you to reconsider whether it is the correct thing to do. That is why I support this campaign. It is not aiming to ban Page 3, and does not represent a call for censorship of the media. Instead, it is a call to newspaper editors to recognise the influence they exert when they exercise this right, and to ask them not to exercise it in ways that are damaging to their fellow citizens. It is also asking consumers of The Sun to reflect upon the view of women they are being offered, and to reject the sexist and archaic ideas about the place of women in society it promotes.

I also found Caroline Criado-Perez's Huffington Post article very informative as it discusses how women who oppose page 3 and the like are denigrated and intimidated.

If you agree with Lucy, Rebecca, Caroline and I, please sign the petition, follow @nomorepage3 on Twitter and like the Facebook page.  Above all, share with everyone you know in whatever real world or online way you like.