The Guardian
15 November 2005

What does it tell us that Page 3 is 35 years old?  I think it has marked a cheapening of the image of women and of social attitudes to sexuality. Those who claim that Page 3 or pornography equals sexual liberation are in my view profoundly mistaken. I read recently of a study of young people and their early sexual experiences.  One young woman said it first happened for her at 14 in a toilet.  Her dream was to do it in a bed with someone she loved.

I stumbled into the middle of the debate about Page 3 and pornography in 1986 when I stayed in the House of Commons one Friday to prevent Enoch Powell’s Bill which sought to outlaw infertility treatment coming before the House.  The way to do this was to make speeches on the previous business, which happened to be a Bill introduced by Winston Churchill – the grandson of the great Winston – to control pornography.  The Bill consisted of a list of visual images which would be banned.  It would have outlawed much war reporting, medical textbooks and sex education materials.  I got up to make an unrehearsed speech, saying that I opposed the Bill for these reasons, but that I did agree that pornographic images of women degraded us all and that I thought we could legislate to remove them from newspapers and therefore their widespread circulation in the mainstream of society, without endangering any valuable freedom.  As I spoke, I went on to say that I thought I would introduce my own Bill to this effect.  I received a clutch of letters from women saying how much they hated Page 3 and how they hoped I would do so.

I then set about applying for a slot to introduce the Bill and to draft it tightly and carefully so that newspapers would not be allowed to carry pictures of naked or semi-naked women in sexually provocative poses.  By chance, my date in the House of Commons came the day after my father died, so I left home with my mother and sisters and brothers quietly grieving to face a bear pit in the House of Commons.  In those days, the atmosphere in the Commons was very male and mention of anything remotely connected with sex or even cervical cancer would make them behave like immature schoolboys.  And so they did, laughing and jeering at me and the argument I was making but with a fair number eventually voting with me in support of the Bill.

This was followed by an avalanche of tens of thousands of moving, passionate, sad and angry letters from women who strongly supported the Bill and wanted it passed into law.  Some said shockingly that such pictures had been used when they were sexually abused.  Teachers talked of the confusion on girls’ faces when newspapers were brought to school to cover desks and the Page 3 image caused the boys to leer.  Some told me how they had been referred for psychiatric treatment because of their dislike of pornography.  Many letters from nursing mothers told stories of how frequently they had been told to stop breastfeeding and how much they resented this as they moved about a society which bombarded them with images of women’s breasts.  Many, many letters said how relieved the writer was to find that other women hated such images as much as they did.

The argument has continued ever since.  The Mirror gave up its Page 3, but the Sun still flaunts it.  The personal consequence for me was a campaign of vilification from the Sun which was taken up in the same smearing, sexualised way for a second time after I resigned from the government over Iraq in 2003. 

Clearly the effort to outlaw Page 3 failed completely and pornographic images proliferate ever more widely in our society.  But I think some good things were achieved as the argument became so public.  Many women who had been accused of being prudish and screwed up about sex because of their dislike of pornography, found that their feelings were shared by most women.  And those who defend pornography on the grounds that it somehow claimed to be a celebration of liberated sexuality fail to understand those of us who have a different understanding of sexuality as something passionate, beautiful and tender which is deeply degraded by endless images of women available to be taken, used and then thrown away.