Skip to main content

Boobless.


It seems like, after 44 years, The Sun will finally excise topless women from page 3. If they could fix their content from pages 1-2 and 4+ too, I’d be happy.

It’s not much of a newspaper if we’re honest; more a collection of pictures loosely tied together by a few trashy, tabloid-style headlines. Its outlook is childish. The emphasis isn’t so much on news as celebrity lifestyle, based on the simplistic assumption you can guess what’s going on in someone’s private life from a few hastily snapped paparazzi photographs. You can’t, by the way.

(Bang goes my chance to appear in one of their adverts.)

There’s something archaic about The Sun. It’s attitude is firmly rooted in the 1970s. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see in Fletcher and Godber’s cell, or poking out of Rigsby’s back pocket. The semi-nude girl dominating its immediate innards is a major factor of this. Page 1 becomes a cover story in more ways than one: a way of saying "we’ll keep up the pretense of bringing you a news for bit, but turn the page and you’ll get what you came for". No pun intended.

It’s always made me embarrassed. Any time I flick through the paper in a café or on a train, I alway skip quickly to page 4. The paranoia is there before I open it.  Linger too long and people will think I’m a pervert. Worse still: a pervert who won't buy his own salacious material.

The inclusion of those knowing, intentionally wry captions attributing apparently incongruous quotes to the model doesn’t help. We’re supposed to find it hilarious that a woman looking like that could say something intelligent. That's one for Everyday Sexism.

Perhaps I sound too soapboxy. There are worse publications (*cough* The Daily Mail *cough*). There’s nothing evil about nipples, except for when they chafe. We shouldn't need to banish them from sight. I'm not Nigel Farage (thank God). It’s when a person is treated as an object that I start to baulk.  

Let’s face it: based on their obsession with Z-list celebrities, even if The Sun gets rid of page 3, it'll still be full of tits.
 

 

Popular posts from this blog

Shakerpuppetmaker.

Have Parker from Thunderbirds and Noel Gallagher ever been seen in the same room? The resemblance is uncanny. So much so, I think something’s afoot. If my suspicions are correct, I've stumbled across a secret that will blow the music and puppet industry wide apart. In the mid-60s / mid-90s at least. It doesn’t take long to see the signposts. There’s the similarity between the name of Oasis’ first single, Supersonic, and Supermarianation, Gerry Anderson’s puppetry technique. The Gallagher brothers would often wear Parkas . Live Forever was clearly a reference to Captain Scarlet and Standing on the Shoulder of Giants to the size difference between Noel and his bandmates. The more you think about it, the more brazen it gets. It’s fishier than Area 51, Paul is Dead and JFK's assassination put together. The only glitch to the theory is scale . According to Wikipedia, Anderson’s marionettes were 1’10” and Gallagher is 5’8”. How does he maintain an illusion of avera...

'...I'm Gonna Look at You 'til My Eyes Go Blind."

Over the past week or two, I’ve been on a bit of a Sheryl Crow kick, largely thanks to rediscovering her cover of one of my most-liked Bob Dylan songs. She has one of my favourite female voices, yet despite this, I only own one CD and that’s just a single (her '97 release ‘Hard to Make a Stand’); on that basis, you can only imagine how much of her back catalogue I’d own if I hated her (it would fall into minus-figures). Dylan, conversely, takes up more of my collection than anyone else, save The Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work. He’s one of those artists who, when you get him, you really get him - and once I’d tuned into his style as a student, I'd time and again be blown away by his lyrics; he’ll have more jaw-dropping imagery in one track than other people fit in a whole career. These days, I mostly listen to music in the morning when getting ready, and more often than not, this will consist of a suggested YouTube playlist when I’m in the bath, r...

"Speaking Words of Wisdom, Let it Shine."

Tonight saw the second instalment of BBC1’s latest advertise-a-musical-for-months-and-then-cast-it-with-performers-too-inexperienced-to-do-it-a-thon ‘Let it S̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ Shine’ (or as I call it: ‘REAL AUDITIONS ARE NOTHING LIKE THIS’). I didn’t watch it (clearly), but being reminded of how angry seeing just five minutes of it made me last week caused me to mull over what I would call a musical based on the band’s songbook, if I was responsible for it. Here are a my suggestions: IDEAS FOR TITLE OF A TAKE THAT MUSICAL: Barlow! Dirty Fat-Dancing Orange! A Million Love-changes-everything Songs Owen! Howard's End Pray Misérables Mamma Marka! Babe (with a pig as the lead) …BUT MY FAVOURITE HAS TO BE: Jason & His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. "It was Orange, Orange, Orange, Orange..." (TAKE) THAT’S ENOUGH OF (TAKE) THAT.