Tits Out for the Lads

The reaction to the retirement of The Sun's Page 3 has been notable for the complete absence of wank. By which I mean, no one has mentioned the role of masturbation. Some commentators have suggested that soft-porn in a daily newspaper lost its value once the Internet opened the firehose of hardcore, but this misses the point that online porn elbowed out top-shelf mags, not tabloid newspapers. Nobody bought The Sun instead of Men Only. Some men did buy the paper to provide material they could both safely leave around the workplace and tuck under an arm as they wandered off to a toilet stall for a mid-morning hand shandy (it was less obvious than unhooking the Pirelli calendar). Presumably their needs will now be catered for by The Daily Star.

I'm not suggesting that the disappearance of Page 3 is due solely to a decline in workplace wanking, but it is worth noting the impact of two developments. Joan Smith amusingly suggested a positive role for the Internet: "What made the difference was the internet, which allowed a new generation of women to articulate their opposition to Page 3 and support each other in the face of a backlash". In fact, the key technological change was not the Web or Twitter, but the appearance after 2010 of cheap smartphones supporting video streaming. The key social change has not been the rise of third or fourth-wave feminism but tighter workplace monitoring, with some employers now docking pay or requiring formal requests for loo-breaks. In such a closely inspected environment, the five knuckle shuffle either becomes an unaffordable luxury or necessitates the "quick hit" of a two minute video.

Rupert Murdoch's decision is widely seen as epochal, but I was pleased to see that the paper had not lost its sense of proportion when it said that "Page 3 of The Sun is where it’s always been, between pages 2 and 4", suggesting they might have momentarily considered retiring it, like a football club ostentatiously reserving the squad number of a celebrated player. One thing that Murdoch and his critics had in common was the claim that Page 3 was "old-fashioned", but this is as redundant as saying that Eastenders and Coronation Street are old-fashioned. The question is, what sort of old-fashioned? Rent-a-rant defenders have tried to put it in the tradition of British bawdy, but a better clue was provided by one critic, Stella Creasy, saying "we didn’t need boobs with our breakfast tables", as if most people still got a paper delivered and had time to read it over their boiled egg and soldiers before setting off for work. Surely they have convenience stores and coffee shops in Walthamstow? And do they really still say "boobs"?

While many have associated Page 3 with Benny Hill, a man who literally ran away from adult women, a more troubling spectre has been Jimmy Savile, with many pointing out that The Sun only stopped using 16-year old models in 2003 and was happy once upon a time to dress them in school uniforms. Famously, the paper ran a countdown in advance of Sam Fox's 16th birthday, having featured her previously but without exposed nipples. Paul Gadd (aka Gary Glitter) is currently appearing at Southwark Crown Court (and on a double page spread of The Sun, no doubt). But I think it is wrong to imagine, as Joan Smith does, that "The sexual revolution made Page 3 possible", not least because it was more Health & Efficiency than Forum. This was a cultural artefact of the 70s and 80s, rather than the 60s, and one that looked quaint by the 90s with the arrival of "lads' mags" and their recuperation of Robin Askwith and all his works. Page 3 was of its time, and therefore inescapably Thatcherite, and you wouldn't explain her away as an opportunistic byproduct of second-wave feminism.

Another critique of Page 3's failing powers centres on the increasing use of candid shots of nude or partially-clothed slebs across the media. Some of these will be as staged as the traditional model photos while others are on the border of an invasion of privacy. In contrast, Page 3 was highly formulaic, from its fetishistic staging to the language and tone of the caption. In other words, it was looking increasingly tired up against MailOnline's human zoo, the 'sidebar of shame', which appears to have cornered the mass-market in both self-righteous prurience and borderline lewd since the demise of The News of the World. One common assumption is that MailOnline appeals mainly to women, just like the print version, hence the obsession with physical imperfection and diets, however it appears to do equally well among men, and quite possibly the same "lads" who used to buy Loaded in the 90s and are now fascinated by Kim Kardashian's arse.

Why did Page 3 last for 44 years? It wasn't Murdoch's stubbornness in the face of feminists, nor his commitment to free speech (announcing its demise in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings has predictably stimulated the usual suspects into concerns over self-censorship). I think the clue is that it has almost covered the entire working life of the core Thatcher generation. Someone born in the mid-50s would have been a teenager when Page 3 appeared, and will now be approaching retirement. Up to the 70s, women tended to vote more for the Conservatives than Labour. The Thatcher breakthrough owed much to the initial maintenance of that advantage augmented by a swing to the right by male voters. From the 80s onwards, women have shifted left, coincident with their growing presence in the labour market. Though there is much talk at election time of targeting women, in reality it is male voters who have been more likely to "swing", particularly those in their 20s and 30s. Blair's embrace of "Cool Britannia" was a psephological calculation, not just starfucking.

I think the chief reason that Page 3 has been retired is that the target demographic has been dispersed due to economic and social change. The primary sector and manufacturing continue to decline. Transport and warehouse workers have ended up on short-term contracts or been obliged to become self-employed, so downtime means you're not earning. Workers generally are up against the clock. Offices have become increasingly sensitive to overt sexism as women have advanced, so not only are the topless calendars disappearing, so too are magazines as both sexes (and particularly the young) retreat to the Internet on phones and tablets. The Sun even appears to have gone out of fashion as a token of laddishness and ironic class contempt on City trading floors, where a ruffled copy open at page 3 (seriously "manhandled") was a way of marking territory in open-plan offices. In London, it is now unusual to see a paper being read on the Tube other than the free Evening Standard.

Page 3 was a serious work of ideology, and specifically performative gender, not just in its portrayal of women as fluffy-headed, antiseptic pleasure bots, but in its implicit portrayal of the working class male as more-cock-than-brain yet as sexually sophisticated as a sausage roll. We should celebrate its demise as the last weak fart of Thatcher's mouldering corpse, but we should also recognise that it represents a kind of proletarian defeat.