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Page Three
Tabloids tread a strange tightrope between news and
entertainment, and form a bizarre adjunct to the British
public sphere. The history of The Sun’s
Page Three (which I researched as a Vera Douie fellow
at the Women’s Library, London) says so much about
the history of British attitudes to nudity, to women
and to the freedom of the press. This history is surprising.
For instance, topless pinups were inspired by 60s naturists
and hippies, the first page three girls were foreigners
and there were naked men on Page Three in the 1970s.
The Questions that intrigue me about the history of
Page Three are:
• Why is it that the bestselling paper in Britain
has a topless pinup as its mascot?
• Why are there no male pinups in the mainstream
press?
• Why is it that Britain has one of the lowest
rates of breast-feeding in Europe?
• Is Page Three prudish? Is public nudity liberating
or exploitative?
‘Bosom of the Nation: Page Three in the 1970s
and the 1980s’ is published in
Rude Britannia, ed. Mina Gorji (Routledge)
2007
Extract from Rude Britannia:
“The Sun did not invent the bosom”
Larry Lamb
The Sun has been the bestselling daily paper
in Britain since 1978. Its topless pinup page, known
as Page Three, first appeared in the early 1970s and
it soon became the paper’s mascot. Like the busty
wooden carvings perched on the prow of seventeenth-century
galleons, the Page Three girl is the figurehead for
the Sun, symbolizing its irreverence, its no
nonsense explicitness and, some would say, its misogyny.
Page Three has its origins in the 1960s permissive society;
it emerged out of wider debates about the nature of
obscenity, about what was acceptable to show in public,
and, in turn, how to define what was in fact ‘public’.
By printing photographs of topless women the Sun
provoked questions about the freedom of the press, but
most of all it tested the limits of what was offensive.
In an article in the women’s pages of the Sun
in December 1969, Deirdre MacSharry declared that ‘the
year 1969 was when men and women took their clothes
off in public in a startling manner. Now…we have
got over the shock and nudes are no longer regarded
as rude’. But not everyone had got over the shock.
As we shall see, the journalists and editors at the
Sun carefully shaped its Page Three to skirt
the boundaries of rudeness, test the limits of public
tolerance and to generate free publicity.
Reviews: Click on the review to read in full
I have appeared on radio and television in debates
about pinups and the press.
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