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.