ABSTRACT
The current insistence that we are living in a post-feminist age, where all the battles between women and men have been fought and won, is often accompanied by a backwards nod to the 1970s when second wave feminism is credited with fomenting dissent, rabble-rousing and finally getting sex equality on to the political agenda. To be sure, it was a profoundly important decade for a number of reasons and 1970 in particular saw the Equal Pay Act get on to the statute book and witnessed the first national meeting of the women’s liberation movement take place at Ruskin College. In that same year, the Miss World contest was disrupted by those self-same ‘women’s libbers’ armed with flour bombs and water pistols, Annie Nightingale became the first ever woman DJ on Radio 1 and Lloyd’s of London admitted its first woman underwriter. In the same year, and making an equally important statement but for rather different reasons, the Sun published its first naked pin-up, and page3 was born. Nearly four decades later, the controversy that page3 first created shows no sign of resolution and the battle lines are drawn in almost exactly the same formation now as they were in 1970. This chapter explores the ways in which the debate around page3 has always been about much more than just a bare breast in a tabloid newspaper. Rather, page3 became, and is still, the catalyst for broader arguments about the place of sex in popular culture, the impact that routinised representations of women’s bodies as commodity have on intimate relations in the real world, and the link between the airbrushed pin-up woman and trends in self-harm, cosmetic surgery and eating disorders among real and especially young women.
