What kind of man hating Nazi would want to get rid of Page Three!?

As I established in my last blog, I am not a man hater. I do not want to get rid of Page Three to spite men. It is awful how I have to defend my opinion in such an obvious way, but having been called a "man hating Nazi" I felt like I should probably clear that up- again.

I've always been amazed by the defences to Page Three. The arguments don't really make much sense to me. I usually get the response of "there's no harm in it". There is. There really is. It's harmed me specifically, as I continue to battle self-confidence issues which are a direct cause of Page Three. I said in "A few basics" that Page Three started to interest me aged 12. This is because I was 12 when I started to see Page Three on a regular basis.

 I was often called fat and ugly at school, and it always bothered me but I got used to it. Then one day, when I think I was 13, I noticed that the boys who called me these names were looking at Page Three, huddled around at the back of the classroom, hiding it from the teacher. They were laughing and openly perving over this woman. I then compared myself to this woman, who I remember to have bleached blonde hair and was particularly skinny. I immediately then realised that I didn't look anything like her, and this bothered me a lot. It set the standard for what I "should" look like and the battle with the word "should" is one I am still fighting. I told myself that if I looked like Michelle, 19, from Blackpool then I wouldn't be bullied. I blamed the behaviour of the boys around me on my body. I'm not asking for sympathy and you may think that I'm blaming my own low self-esteem on Page Three but for me, that's when I believe the low self-esteem really started. I still battle with body confidence, but I am so much more positive about my body than I was when I was younger. (I should note that if my teacher had seen the boys looking at Page Three, the boys would have been in serious trouble, as they would have been if I had reported how I felt. I come from an amazing secondary school which takes things like this very seriously, and any comments of "how did the teacher not do anything?" will be ignored).

This leads me on to the next Page Three defence, the classic "it's actually a celebration of women's beauty". I find this really hard to accept. It's such a specific, narrow-minded representation of beauty. In case it isn't obvious, skinny or slim women with big breasts aren't the only kind of beautiful women. They are beautiful, but other women are beautiful too. In an argument with an individual who calls themselves a "beauty defender", it was stated that the women are used because they are what is "generally regarded as beautiful". I argued that this could actually be symptomatic of Page Three, which arguably creates this false ideal sense of beauty. A response, further down the line of the argument was that I "could hardly expect Susan Boyle to be on Page Three". This comment really bothered me, and it was at that point I turned off my computer for the night. This comment confirms that Page Three is about a specific area of beauty. It doesn't "celebrate" women or "empower" them. The models are there to be looked at and visually enjoyed. Why doesn't Susan Boyle, or anyone who doesn't necessarily meet the specific criteria, belong on Page Three? Surely if it's the "celebration of women's beauty" that people say it is, it would celebrate all kinds of beauty. Furthermore, the idea of beauty being something which only the eyes experience has always seemed shallow to me. I may be on my own here, but I see beauty as a concept which goes further than just what someone looks like. If Page Three was truly a celebration of female beauty, then there is no reason why Susan Boyle doesn't belong there. She is an amazing and beautiful woman.

The argument "but the women want to do it" also is one I find myself arguing almost on a daily basis. I'm glad that the women want to do it, I really am. This doesn't make Page Three OK. The women who want to do glamour modelling still can. All No More Page Three is saying is that glamour modelling doesn't belong in a newspaper. It isn't news. The women have the choice to model in other places, it wouldn't be taking away food and water from the model's families, as often suggested. There's a massive market for glamour modelling outside of Page Three. This doesn't mean I support lads mags or anything like that at all, I just think it's ludicrous to suggest that NMP3 is taking away the freedom the models have to work. 

I have loads more reasons why I disagree with the defence for Page Three, and I imagine that I will be getting some lovely suggestions coming my way shortly.

Thanks for reading anyway, please comment and share!

Jess x