No More Page 3 campaign founder talks to The Argus about run-ins with Rupert Murdoch and death threats

The Argus (TA): What right do you have to tell a commercial business how it should run? Surely if Sun readers were so disgusted by Page 3 they would stop buying it?

Lucy-Anne Holmes (LAH): Well, the Human Rights Act allows me the right to free speech and peaceful protest. I, and the people who support No More Page 3, are merely exercising that right.

All we are doing is asking The Sun to stop showing the bare breasts of young women in a family newspaper.

Perhaps another question could be ‘what right did the Sun have in 1970 to start showing pictures of naked 16 year old girls?’ (it was only in 2003 that the models had to be 18).

I’ve been working on the campaign now for over a year and I’ve yet to meet a Sun reader who would stop buying the paper if they dropped Page 3, the sport seems to be the most popular reason for buying it amongst the people I’ve spoken to, plus the offers and the tone of the journalism, witty headlines etc.

I have met people though who say they would buy The Sun if it didn’t have Page 3.

Interestingly The Irish Sun dropped their topless pictures in August because they felt they put many people off buying a paper they might otherwise enjoy.

(TA): Should we ban images of scantilyclad men? For example Torso of the Week in Heat magazine?

(LAH): No. And we are not actually trying to ban anything. No More Page 3 isn’t a call for censorship and it’s important to make that clear. But the issue of Torso of the Week is an interesting one.

Sometimes people say ‘but we have Torso of the Week’ as though that makes the situation somehow equal.

But there is no male equivalent to Page 3. A topless man pictured in a weekly magazine with a relatively low circulation doesn’t come close to a daily topless woman in a newspaper that reaches millions every day.

A topless man is very different in our society, we see topless men on the TV before the watershed or going about their business in the summer. But we don't see topless women in the same way. A child looking at Torso of the Week in Heat magazine wouldn’t find it nearly as odd as seeing a picture of a woman in her knickers, amidst page after page of pictures of men in clothes doing things like running the country and achieving in sport in a newspaper.

That being said I know many people who support No More Page 3 don’t like Torso of the Week either.

We are seeing more and more objectification of men nowadays, so it is hardly surprising we also are seeing a rise in eating disorders and body dismorphia amongst young men.

(TA): Why are you bothering with topless images in The Sun? Surely extreme pornography on the internet is far more damaging?

(LAH): Page 3 was decided by men in the 1970s. 99% of online porn is made by men. Everywhere we look we see female sexuality represented by men. I think what we’re seeing now is people, and especially women, standing up and speaking up about how they feel about this.

I agree that extreme pornography on the net can be damaging, especially to women.

Some studies show that 88% of porn shows acts of physical aggression towards women and many of the teachers who have signed the No More Page 3 petition have mentioned their fear at how widely available online porn is impacting on boys’ behaviour towards young girls.

But Page 3 is connected to all this.

When we show a passive, naked available woman in a family newspaper, what are we teaching young boys about how to respect women? What are we teaching little girls about where their value lies?

A young girl being coerced into sexting a picture of her breasts, for example, will look about at the society she lives in and say ‘should I do this?’ Page 3 being in a newspaper tells her that this is ultimately what she’s here for.

Page 3 disempowers women and girls, and makes them more susceptible to the impact of online porn and its pressures.

(TA): What general reaction do you get from men? Do you get any opposition or even abuse?

(LAH): Occasionally we get flurries of abuse, such as ‘F*** off you’ve got s*** t**s’ or we get told we’re ‘beasts’ and ‘munters’.

To be honest this actually just confirms what we’re doing and makes us work harder. Sometimes the tone is even darker than that though and I have had death threats.

But on the whole we have a huge and growing number of male supporters of all ages. Sometimes I look at our Facebook page and it seems to be all pictures of men wearing our T-shirts or blogs written by men.

Many fathers support us, they may have bought the paper before and been part of ‘cor, look at the t**s on that’ (THAT!) dialogues. But suddenly when they become fathers, they start to see the world and its messages through the eyes of their little boy or girl.

(TA): Tell me about your Twitter encounter with Rupert Murdoch, did anything come of that?

(LAH): We held a Tweet Murdoch Day back in February, encouraging supporters to tweet Rupert Murdoch.

He tweeted back saying he was considering dropping Page 3 and wondering what to replace it with. He suggested ‘Glamourous fashionistas’.

Bless him, he hasn’t really got his head round the fact that women actually say and do and think interesting and incredible things, and aren’t just there to be looked at.

The tweet was terrific for us, we gained 20,000 signatures in the space of about two weeks and our profile was increased by all the media we got. I even went on Mexican telly.

(TA): Where did the idea for the campaign come from? Was there a particular trigger?

(LAH): I bought a copy of The Sun last summer during the Olympics – I grew up with The Sun, my brother always said it was the best paper for sport. I didn’t see a Page 3 model, and she wasn’t on Page 5, I assumed the Sun had dropped the feature while the Olympics was on.

I was on the train reading about Team GB and particularly Jessica Ennis who had just won her terrific gold medal.

Then I turned to Page 13 and there was a massive image of a beautiful young woman in her knickers. It was strange. It suddenly felt as though I’d been slapped in the face and told it was a man’s world.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Hers was the largest female image, larger than any of Jessica Ennis or any other woman. I realised it had been this way for 42 years.

I wrote a letter to the editor asking him to stop showing the topless pictures, but once I’d sent it I knew it would do nothing.

Yet I still felt so passionately that these pictures shouldn’t be shown in a newspaper.

I wondered if I could feel all this passion and be the only one, so I started an online petition, twitter and Facebook page to find out.

(TA): Do you realistically think the owners of The Sun are going to get rid of Page 3 because of a campaign?

(LAH): Yes. An ex News International employee tweeted one day how The Sun hates the campaign because they hate having to continually keep justifying Page 3.

I think this is key. I don’t see how they can continue to justify the unjustifiable.

Practically every charity that works to end violence against women supports us, including Rape Crisis, Women’s Aid, and the End Violence Against Women’s Coalition, not to mention the Girl Guides, British Youth Council, Girls’ Brigade, teaching unions including the NUT, ALT, NAHT, the Welsh Assembly, The Scottish Parliament, UNISON and a host of other organisations.

We are all saying ‘please, stop, these pictures are damaging and affecting how men treat women and how women feel about themselves’. It’s 2013, we’re Great Britain, if we believe in equality we can’t show naked women in the newspaper and I think the people at The Sun realise that.

(TA): Are we not in danger of making the human body so forbidden that it will have the opposite effect to what you’re after?

(LAH): Not at all. I’m all for nudity and celebrating the human form. But this isn’t doing that.

If these pictures were about celebrating the human form, they would show men and women of all shapes and sizes, we’d see women breast feeding, a woman who had a mastectomy or a contented elderly man sitting naked under a tree.

From the people we speak to, it seems that these pictures are actually stopping people from enjoying being nude.

We’ve spoken to so many people who have said that they don’t even want to get naked in front of their partners because they feel apologetic they don’t look like Page 3 models and teenagers who haven’t even finishing developing but want breast enhancement because they feel they should look like the models on Page 3.

The Sun has even printed articles about ‘Perfect Breasts’ where a plastic surgeon explains what the perfect breast is like.

(TA): What are your plans for future action? Where else can you take the campaign?

(LAH): We have some great plans up our sleeves and the momentum for the campaign is definitely building.

One area where we’re seeing amazing energy for it is in universities.

To date 22 universities have voted to stop selling The Sun until it drops Page 3, with many more currently campaigning to do so.

Recently we’ve seen schools wanting to support also and asking us how they can get involved.

We are asked to speak a lot at universities, schools, and the diary is filling up with WIs at the moment also.

The campaign has always sparked a lot of creativity and inspired many poems, blogs and music, a choir has written and performed a song, Doc Brown made us a rap and we have folk protest songs written in support.

It really is a people-powered movement with people doing whatever they can to get the message out.

I don’t just think what we’re doing is important, I think how we’re doing it is very special.

With no money, just the passion of volunteers, we’re taking on the might of The Sun and we’re doing it with integrity, creativity and an awful lot of tenacity.

For more details search No More Page 3 on Twitter and Facebook.

To sign their petition visit change.org/nomorepage3