Non-British readers might
not know this, but our best-selling newspaper, the Sun (circ. 2.7 million),
features daily a topless young woman on page 3. When I present the Sun newspaper as part of an overview of
the British media in my journalism class, my international students are rather
incredulous and many are deeply offended. Here, people are used to it and
no one raises an eyebrow at the men who slowly study their page 3. on the
tube. Young women apparently volunteer
to figure there and boyfriends send pictures of their sweethearts to the Sun as a tribute to
their beauty. But many women resent
this blatant sexism in our media and have campaigned against page 3. for
decades.
Last week, on the
42nd anniversary of the first topless woman appearing on page 3 of the Sun, the human
rights group Object led a protest against the tabloid's sexism and
objectification of women. Demonstrators prepared giant birthday cards – one
with images of topless women from
the tabloids and one with fully-clothed professional men from the same papers –
and delivered them in front of the office of the Sun's editor, Dominic Mohan,
at News International's headquarters in London.
Mohan defended page
3. as an "innocuous British institution" while giving evidence to the
Leveson inquiry in February. And
previous Sun’s editors, including Rebekah Wade (now Brooks), have always
maintained that page 3. is part of the DNA of the paper and that people who
object could simply not buy the paper. But that’s not the point: even if we
don’t read the Sun, the images are there. What is the impact of continuously
presenting women as sex objects and men as doers?
By the way, when
protestors put a photograph of the birthday cards on Facebook, it was swiftly
removed without warning, because the explicit images apparently violate
Facebook's terms. Yet these images came from our national newspapers,
fully available to all, sold in supermarkets and newsagents.
And it’s not like pages. 3
are a blip in media portraying women as capable and respectable. It would help if there were at
least more positive images of women and more women's voices to balance this
out. But as numerous projects have shown, this is far from the case. A report by Women in Journalism last
month showed that women account for just 16% of those mentioned or quoted in
lead stories. And when they were mentioned, they were often presented as victims. (See my previous blog post about this.)
Women have
campaigned against page. 3 all along without much success, but let’s hope the Leveson inquiry will help bring a new focus on sexism in the
media.
