The Sun has quietly dropped topless models on its Page 3, after years of campaigning from the No More Page 3 activists about against the page's starring feature.
The news of the paper's decision to reverse 45 years of plastering the page with half-nude models (some were as young as 16 until 1992, and up until 2013 each girl came with a sarky made-up opinion on a current news story, designed to make the woman look a bit stupid) was confirmed to* The Guardian* by an insider, who said: 'This comes from high up, from New York'.
The Times, which is owned by the same media company as The Sun, pretty much confirmed it with the headline: The Sun has got its top on…page 3 covers up after 45 years' and spoke to a spokesperson for The Sun to find out where its page 3 had gone. They responded snarkily, but you get the gist, as it seems like the topless model on Page 3 is now available online-only: 'Page 3 of* The Sun* is where it’s always been, between pages 2 and 4, and you can find Lucy from Warwick at Page3.com.'
Friday was the last topless edition, it seems, as Monday's Page 3 featured an underwear-covered Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and today's Page 3 has three girls from Hollyoaks in bikinis. Lucy-Anne Holmes, who headed up the NoMorePage3 campaign has been recieving congratulations overnight, and tweeted: 'The wall of love coming our way is really powerful this morning! Thank you all. Best Tuesday ever!'
Labour MP Stella Creasy also told BBC Radio 4: 'This is the start of a conversation about how we portray 51% of the population'. Another poltician who will no doubt be celebrating today is Clare Short (who was MP for Birmingham Ladywood until 2010), who has been campaigning about the issue for decades.
It might not seem a little hypocritical to be all #freethenipple on Instagram but applaud the loss of topless female models on* The Sun* - as one-time editor Piers Morgan pointed out, other papers and magazines produce photos of, say, Keira Knightley topless.
However, the difference is who is meant to consume the images. The Sun's readership is 65% men, and contain many editorials, headlines, exclusive photoshoots and columns from the likes of Rod Liddle and Katie Hopkins that make it seem as if they just don't like women at all. On the other hand, for all their foibles, fashion magazines are there to celebrate women, a women-driven industry and its achievements, and at least some of the papers that reproduce topless images of female celebrities give the idea they don't hate women.
Plus, symbolically, this is huge. As Laura Bates of Everyday Sexism points out at her talks,* The Sun* is routinely used by creepy guys to get conversations going with girls; you can't get your phone out to show a girl on the bus the porn you're looking at, but when you've got a newspaper right there, it apparently seems more legit. Well, no more. No longer are we a country that routinely has a naked woman on the third page of its biggest selling newspaper.
We don't know exactly what spurred the change, but with just a handful of months to go until the general election, you can bet it's any number of the political parties with a 'women issue' who've gone about getting one of their biggest influencers to play ball, not boobs.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.