Dear David Cameron,
I’m writing to you
to ask you to support the No More Page 3 campaign.
I know you’ve not
been a fan in the past. I know that you’ve dismissed us, told us to ‘turn the
page’, and brushed off Caroline Lucas when she tried to engage you in debate,
but, after listening to your interviews on Woman’s Hour and The Jeremy Vine
show this week, I realised this has all been down to a terrible
misunderstanding. During your conversation with Jane Garvey you said that you couldn’t support a ban on
Page 3, and that it was
not the place for government regulation. Good news. We agree!
You see, our
campaign is not about banning Page 3 at all! Don’t feel too bad about
it, you’re definitely not the only one who has made that mistake (our twitter
feed is often riddled with people deploring us for our attack on the free
press, and our apparent disregard for free speech). Our campaign does not ask
for a ban. It does not ask for censorship. It certainly does not ask for
government intervention or regulation. Instead, we try to explain the Editor of
The Sun (currently David Dinsmore) why Page 3 is not a particularly responsible
thing to feature in a mainstream publication, and reminding him that he has an
editorial responsibility, and perhaps he could use that to some level of
professionalism, and that we’re not living in an episode of On The Buses
anymore. We do not look for a ban, we look to change attitudes.
The reason we do not
ask for a ban is because a ban does not solve the problem of the damaging
sexist attitudes that led to Page 3 even existing in the first place. A ban
does not mean that the big players in mainstream media have suddenly woken up
and thought ‘you know what, this is 2013, and not a Benny Hill sketch, and many
of the people I love and care about are women, and maybe I should start
treating them as people rather than tits and arse’. A ban would not change
these attitudes. They would simply make them less visible, further encouraging
misinformed misogynists to declare ‘I don’t even know what these feminists are
on about - they have jobs, trousers and the vote, why can’t they just accept
we’re all equal now and go make me a sandwich?!’. If there’s going to be sexist
nonsense and outdated attitudes going on, I want them out there where I can see
them - I want them on the twitter feeds, I want them in the bumbling rubbish
spewed out by MPs and I want them dripping down the right-hand side of the Mail
Online. Because if they’re out there where we can see them, then we can point
at them, we can laugh at them, and, more importantly, we can fight them. And
that’s what we’re doing with Page 3. We are, on a daily basis, pointing at this
anachronistic example of sexism, and more and more people are joining us in
saying ‘oh yeah, that’s not really right, is it.’ We’d really like you to be
one of those people.
We do not ask for a
ban because we would rather challenge The Sun’s sexism until their editorial
team sees that it has no place in today’s society, until they can be persuaded
that this is not right, and until they make the voluntary decision to remove
the breasts of young women from the pages of their newspaper. I’m sure that
this is something you can empathise with, having told Jeremy Vine that we ‘need companies to act responsibly’. We simply ask for The Sun to
act responsibly. Or, at least, to stop acting like a bad 1970s sitcom.
So there you have
it, David. We’re not asking that you impose a ban. We’re not asking that you
put in place legislation. We’re simply asking that you make a stand alongside
many of your colleagues, and thousands of women and men, to say ‘ Page 3 is not
a decent or respectful way to treat women in our society’. Now, I can’t
think of one good reason why you wouldn’t sign. Can you?
Yours,
No More Page 3
