The Alternative Page 3

Back in 2013, I wrote to the new Editor of The Sun, David Dinsmore, to make a suggestion. As the No More Page 3 campaign was garnering such support, perhaps there was a way he could rehash his Page 3 feature in such a way he could not only save face, he might well win himself a journalism prize to boot? All he had to do was throw the page open to the readers: drop the mute dollies exposing their breasts, and let the readers submit their own choices - people who had inspired them, people who had done great things, overcome the odds, and come up smiling. The page, I posited, could become a place where all the millions of ordinary people out there doing extraordinary things could be celebrated. He could be the man who made the change. Didn’t he want that? I asked him.

He ignored me.

I tried another address and sent it again.

He ignored me again.

So I decided to do something along similar lines myself. On Facebook. As a bit of comic relief for the serious debate going on over on No More Page 3, I decided to rip seven shades of urine out of what I considered to be the ‘Carry On’ crassness of Page 3, by featuring a different woman of accomplishment every day (except weekends – just like The Sun). A woman who had made her mark on the world using her brains, instead of just her breasts. Having heard the news somewhere that some 50-60% of girls in state education in the UK now consider studying for exams to be a waste of time when people like Katie Price have got rich by showing off a pair of surgically inflated mammary glands, I decided to try to demonstrate that there was so much more a woman could do with her life. The plan was to do this every day for a year, or until Page 3 of The Sun was consigned to this country’s embarrassing, seaside postcard past. Whichever came first.

On 2 July 2013, I set up a page called The Alternative Page 3. The pattern I set was that Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays would be for current / contemporary inspirations, Wednesdays would be for Historical (deceased) inspirations, with Fridays devoted to women comedians with clips of their performances - accompanied by the tagline “because of course, women can’t be funny...”

I kicked off with a picture of a brave and nameless young woman smiling for the camera and showing her double mastectomy scars. I followed with a picture of the late Diana Spencer reaching out to an AIDS sufferer, and finished my first day’s work with Maya Angelou and Aung San Suu Kyi.

But the narrative I put with these entries deliberately aped the style of Page 3. I trivialised these amazing women, almost as if I was possessed by the spirit of Sid James. I referred to them as “babes” and “corkers” and coo-coo-ed at their achievements. Of Suu Kyi, I said that the “pretty Nobel Peace Prize winner” liked to play the piano and fight for democracy in Burma; of Maya, I said she liked to write books, and quoted her on the subject of Christmas Tree lights; of Martina Navratilova, she was “tennis tottie” who liked her strawberries and cream and winning a silly amount of Grand Slam titles, and for the “History Babe” that week, Righteous Among the Nations WW2 idol, Irena Sendler, she was a babe who liked helping people, especially those under threat of mass extermination.

The idea was to demonstrate just how absurd and inappropriate it was to discuss human beings in such patronising terms - simply because they were born female. Most of the page’s supporters totally ‘got’ my approach, and laughed along with it, but it was woefully misunderstood by others, who wrote to me in shock and outrage.

“I really don’t think you should be talking about (name) in this way, it’s most disrespectful.”

“If you’re trying to challenge Page 3, why are you trivialising women?”

I answered every comment and every message, explaining again and again the purpose of the page: that it was satire, that it employed the knife under the fifth rib to rip the guts out of ingrained, lazy sexism, but secretly, I was glad I was being challenged, because it meant that the word was hitting home.

Then, as the messages of support also came in, many of them from fathers thanking me for the page because they showed it to their daughters every day, I began to realise I would be very lucky if I could wind it up in a year.

“You can’t stop! You mustn’t stop!” Entreated one.

In fact, I was delighted to see just how many men were liking and contributing to the page. It made me think just how sexism sells men short too. How it drives a wedge between genders, how it kyboshes relationships, and how it instructs men as to what they should find attractive - jeering at them if they prefer the sort of woman who can put up her own damned shelves, to the more obvious fare served up in The Sun every day.

Eventually, my year was up. I posted up a collage of as many of the women I had featured over the year as would fit, and topped it all off with a picture of a mirror. A bit cheesy, because whilst of course nobody would actually be able to actually see their own reflection in a picture of a mirror, the idea was that every single person who supported the page was just as amazing as the people featured on it.

As more messages came in begging me never to stop the page, I threw it open to the supporters, asking them to nominate their own inspirations, and encouraging them to tell me in their own words, just why they considered their choice so fabulous.

I was thrilled as the pictures, words, and ideas came in. The likes leaped up again overnight, and we’re now standing at over 4,000. Not bad for a page that was started merely as a tongue in cheek, nose-thumb at an outdated and embarrassing ‘institution’.

So yes indeed, the page will keep going, and as the world turns, and we all grow up a little bit more each day, The media might grow up a bit too. It’s not too late for David Dinsmore to take up my suggestion. Who knows? He may actually find hearing from his readers rather more interesting than showing pictures of mammary glands every day.

After all, as 52% of the population grow them at some point in their lives, it’s hardly “news”, is it...?

Emmeline Wyndham

Editor and Admin

The Alternative Page 3
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheRealPage3/

1 August 2014