The effects of 40 years of Page Three

Some people say the Sun's most popular feature is 'harmless fun' at best and 'unimportant' at worst. But is it really that simple?

It's forty years since the Sun began sporting tits on Page Three on a daily basis.

When then-Sun editor Larry Lamb first made his gamble in November 1970, few expected the idea to deliver such a massive boost in sales and popularity.

The Sun is today the most popular paper in the country. By far. If newspaper circulation is the yardstick by which a country's obsession is defined and, for instance, Italy's most popular La Gazzetta dello Sport typifies a nation of football fanatics, one would conclude that Britain is literally obsessed with tits, gossip and sex scandals.

Rupert Murdoch's title sells well in excess of three million copies a day, completely dwarfing the circulation of any other broadsheet or tabloid.

Which is why the red top's celebration of their "watershed moment" has triggered a minor debate over whether this type of tabloid behaviour represented a turning point in British popular culture.

Did it help an insanely prudish country shed its sexual inhibitions and hang ups or did it just kickstart a race to the bottom with a more crass and cheaper society?

In other words, is it ok to stick pictures of topless ladies so unrepresentative of womanhood at large for the sole benefit of arousing the base instincts of certain geezers? Is it ok for that to become absolutely normal? Is it prudish, pedantic, middle-class or feminist to wonder - even if just for a second- whether most women would find that debasing or offensive?

Of course, like gossip and scandals, naked pictures had obviously existed before but, with Page Three pummelling bare-chested ladies down the country's throat on a daily basis, this became run-of-the-mill stuff.

Defenders of Page Three see it as a simply cheeky, naughty and fun idea. It's just harmless fun, a billion-making machine that illustrates the country's sense of humour and love for a bit of tacky. In the words of a blog called Mediasnoops, for instance, it's just "a bit silly, a bit immature but largely of great unimportance", stuff that "only middle class feminists with too much time on their hands" care about.

Others, instead, contend that it's "about as funny as the Black and White Minstrel show" and that the normalisation of naked female bodies (of the type idealised by a male-dominated society only), is the epitome of "[S]exual objectification as a part of neoliberal social conditioning" and the symbol of "[women's] unequal status" (Laurie Penny, New Statesman).

So who's right? Are the "harmless fun brigade" correct that Page Three has nothing to do with the normalisation of vulgarity, or is it true, to quote Francis Gilbert's book Yob Nation, that "[the Sun] set the template for modern media culture [by making] topless girls, sex scandal and celebrity gossip a staple of the breakfast table"?

Perhaps we should consider how "harmless" it is when Page Three girls get routinely used as mouthpieces for the Sun's editorial (and political) line -- think of those speechbubbles where topless Giselle, 20, from Essex, expresses her admiration for David Cameron's war on scroungers, or whichever political crusade the Sun is involved in on the day.

What would they say if tucked between a dance off, a panel's opinion and a Bruce Forsythe catchphrase, Strictly Come Dancing also contained a regular feature were leggy dancers made cheeky swipes at the immigrants?

What if popular Premier League matches were also perused to play dog whistle politics, perhaps by having Wayne Rooney, Steve Gerrard or other stars lifting a banner that says "sack public sector workers" , "bomb the crap out of Iraq" or "single mum scum" each time they scored a goal?

Would they still believe the effect would be "totally unimportant"?

Isn't whipping up baying-mob hysteria under the cloak of tits and various lairy stuff actually more disturbing and more poisonous than it if was plain and simple politics?

And, finally, while I cannot judge how women would feel on the subject, I find it so unnecessarily shallow and geezery when concerns regarding the effect of Page Three on sexist attitudes are laughed off as stuff for "middle class feminists with too much time on their hands".

Just look at what happened when a female politician tried to do something about it.

When Clare Short launched a campaign "to remove the degrading images of women as available sex objects [...] circulated in the mainstream of society through the tabloid press", the former MP for Birmingham Ladywood was literally torn to shreds and bullied into submission (of course, in a "fun and cheeky way") until the subject was dropped.

Like Clare Short wrote in her autobiography in 2004:

"A woman journalist asked me at a lunch whether I was still opposed to Page 3. I said I was and this led to busloads of Page 3 girls parked outside my house all day in the hope of setting up embarrassing photos, and mock-up pictures of me as a very fat Page 3 girl. They even sent half-dressed people to the house I share with my 84-year-old mother in Birmingham and had people hiding in cars and chasing me down in the street in an effort to get embarrassing photographs. I dealt with such attacks by not looking at the paper, but it's oppressive to have a double-decker bus plastered with Sun posters outside the front door from seven in the morning".

"Unimportant or not", for that reason alone, I wish Page Three a very unhappy birthday.