Controversies
Page Three has often been controversial, especially with conservatives and women's groups. Some critics consider it to be sexist, demeaning, and exploitative, while others regard it as softcore pornography that is inappropriate for publication in a national newspaper. In 1986, Clare Short, Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood, led an unsuccessful House of Commons campaign to have topless models banned from all British newspapers. After her proposed bill failed, Short accused the House's predominantly conservative male MPs of not taking the issue seriously, remarking, "If you mention breasts, fifty Tory MPs all giggle and fall over." Short renewed her campaign against Page Three almost two decades later, in 2004, but found herself on the receiving end of an attack by the Sun, which superimposed her face on a Page Three model's body and accused her of being "fat and jealous."
Editors of the Sun have periodically considered eliminating the feature from the newspaper. During her tenure as the newspaper's deputy editor, Rebekah Brooks argued that printing topless photographs on Page Three damaged the newspaper's circulation by offending female readers. When she became the tabloid's first woman editor on 13 January 2003, she was widely expected either to terminate Page Three or to modify it so that the models would no longer appear topless. However, she retained the feature unchanged. She later wrote an editorial defending the feature, calling Page Three models "intelligent, vibrant young women who appear in 'The Sun' out of choice and because they enjoy the job."
In August 2012, writer and actor Lucy Holmes began a grass roots social media campaign called 'No More Page Three', to ask the Sun's editor, Dominic Mohan, to voluntarily remove the feature, because of its adverse effects on respect for women and on young women's body image. Within two months, more than 50,000 supporters had signed the petition. This campaign coincided with revelations in the UK media about the sexual abuse of young girls in Rochdale, and with allegations against the late DJ and TV presenter, Sir Jimmy Savile. The public mood seemed right for a discussion of the hyper-sexualisation of British society and the normalisation of sexual images of young women in a national newspaper. The campaign continues.
The Sun and other British tabloids also provoked controversy by featuring girls as young as 16 as topless models, when it was legal to do so. Samantha Fox, Maria Whittaker, Debee Ashby, and others began their topless modelling careers in the Sun at the age of 16, while the Daily Sport was even known to count down the days until it could feature a teenage girl topless on her 16th birthday, as it did with Linsey Dawn McKenzie in 1994, amongst others. In 2003, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 raised the minimum legal age for topless modelling to 18.
Read more about this topic: Page Three