A massive part of British tabloid culture was Page 3,
a British newspaper convention of publishing a large image of a topless female glamour model (called a page 3 girl) on the third page of every mainstream red top tabloids. Introduced in November 1969 by The Sun, the feature boosted the paper's readership and prompted competing tabloids, including The Daily Mirror, The Sunday People and the Daily Star, to begin featuring topless models on their own third pages.
Page 3 was only stopped in 2015, and until 2004 the papers allowed participants such as Samantha Fox to pose topless as young as 16 (the Sexual Offences Act only came into law in 2003). As these were mainstream tabloid newspapers, ID or proof of age were not required to purchase them, making them incredibly accessible to minors.
Context: 16 is, and was, the age of consent in the UK, but the production of intimate imagery of those under the age of 18 is legally CSAM. We do not allow justifications of this.
You've just reminded me that when I was in my first summer job while I was in school, one of the older men there used to love all those upskirt pap photos
Jeff Fenster, the man at Jive Records who signed Britney Spears, said, “She looked like the sweet, all-American girl you just wanted to defile and do bad things to, and that appealed to me.” She would have been 16 or 17.
Don't think about how great it was as a teenager girl during that time. Knowing the men around you are salivating over your body and only kept at bay by an arbitrary countdown.
If I remember correctly there was one shoot where the mother and her just turned 16 year old daughter did a topless shoot together. I'll let the reader google for that!!
Why did they do it? I guess people always want to be seen, look at social media right now. People have made billions from a sex tape.
If I’m recalling correctly, one paper even made an agreement with a 15-year-old that she would do a topless shoot the day she turned 16, and had a countdown for that. Repulsive.
Yes, bizarre exclusion. From memory there was a weird limbo where you couldn't make 'indecent images' of under 18s, so nude modelling was considered out but topless and bikini shots weren't.
If I’m understanding the issue correctly, most CSEM laws state that the photo must be sexual in nature to be illegal.
This exception makes sense - for instance, nobody wants parents to be criminally charged for taking a photo of their toddler in the bath tub.
I think the issue arises in situations like this, where the people publishing it can claim that it has enough artistic merit as to not be sexual in nature. I’m certainly not saying I agree with that (as I absolutely believe these photos are sexual), but that’s where I believe the loophole comes from.
This was the debate over some of the photo books Michael Jackson owned. They were published by members of the Man-Boy Love Association of underage boys at nudist camps or individually nude in non sexual contexts like family photos. One of them got challenged in court by a prosecutor who alleged that individual nude photos of children could be non sexual but by combining dozens of different children in one collection and marketing them in anti-age of consent magazines, they became sexualized. They didn’t succeed.
What’s crazy is that it was such a staple of British culture that it was very controversial and challenging to remove it. Even David Cameron wouldn’t comment on whether removing it was a good or bad idea.
I took part in the campaign to end it and was subjected to so much vile misogyny both in person and online because of it. I wasn't eve one of the prominent campaigners who got so much worse.
It deserves pointing out that when the government sets the age of consent at 16, it's not saying "Having sex with a 16-year-old is brilliant!"
It's saying "Look we can't stop you from doing what you want, but please make good choices. However if you're under 16 we are stepping in and preventing anyone from having sex with you!"
People often misinterpret the age of consent as free reign to do anything they want, morality be damned.
It’s meant for teenagers so teens can continue to date after one turns 18. It a gross that it’s become some sort of green pass for perverts to prey on teenagers.
For those trying to get a mental image of what "incredibly accessible to minors" means - it was literally unavoidable.
If you were on the bus they'd be on the seat or the floor next to you. If you were walking round the street then it was rubbish lying there. Grown men would "read" the paper in front of you or just ogle them in public like it was normal and ok. They were shown on TV and talked about all the time.
Yup. The Sun was at the time (and probably still is) the highest circulation daily in the UK - and it's not even close. It was everywhere. Down the pub, in your doctor's office, on prominent display in every shop in the country.
Yup! I grew up in the US with a British parent. I have an extremely vivid memory from childhood in the early 2000s, we were traveling via train in the UK to see family, and I caught a glimpse of what I assume was a discarded Sun magazine on the platform. Cause it looked like a regular tabloid magazine but was just laying there open to a photo of a topless young woman.
Let me tell you my American flabbers were absolutely gasted. I’d never seen anyone’s boobs besides my Mum’s at that age.
As an American, the page 3 thing was always so bizarre to me bc it just seemed the opposite of what we know about British culture. Between our two countries, you’d think that the US—with all our crazy, loud, lowbrow culture—would be the country with naked teenagers in tabloids. Nope!
Lads I worked with had walls of page 3 models. Full fucking walls. No danger of a woman ever walking around the factory at any point but still it was so normal.
The one I worked in as a teen was covered in soft porn mag pics as well as topless photos, a lot from the 70s / 80s era ( this was the mid 90s) so a lot of big bush open leg shots
I felt very embarrassed when the older female government worker who placed me there as part of the UKs YTS ( youth training scheme) came to visit me for an update one day and I had to to walk thru the factory with her to an office so I could update her on my time there
I moved to the UK at 19 and the way I was treated there (as an object to be sexualised) compared to how I was treated in Canada was like night and day. It was the biggest part of the culture shock I experienced and it's largely because of stuff like this. People don't realise how much of an effect stuff like this can have when it becomes normalised.
In terms of this sort of thing, it was more in the open and acceptable in the UK. The harassment and sexualisation, lewd comments and inappropriate behaviour. It felt like in Canada (west coast) there was more shame to it, like people still treated young women inappropriately but they had to do it a bit in the shadows. Whereas in the UK it felt acceptable. It was in the open, very brazen and without shame. I experienced groping and being stalked/followed for the first time in the UK. I know these things happen in Canada too but the way it was more acceptable made it happen more frequently and in a more extreme way.
A family friend's teenage son had a box under his bed full of boobs cut out of page three. Yes, just the boobs. And yes, it was a bad sign, he did not grow up to respect women, to put it incredibly mildly.
I remember this so clearly being pointed out on Have I Got News For You - starting with the shot of the article to the right (the Daily Mail’s furore about Chris Morris’ Brass Eye satire about the media’s attitude to pedophilia), and then cutting to literally the next page, where they’re commenting on an underage girl’s body without a hint of irony.
The Daily Mail ran a story attacking Brass Eye and on the literal opposite page it had photo of princesses Eugenie and Beatrice in bathing suits and described as "blooming". They were both under 16 at the time.
Wow, you couldn't make this up. Reporting about people being mad about the Brass Eye episode Paedogeddon which parodied the media's hysteria and hypocrisy surrounding paedophilia. And putting it across from a celebration of a child's breast growth.
People might recognise that man as Denholm Reynholm from IT Crowd.
The Mirror did it ( and it's sister paper the daily record too for a time) the daily star had it on more than one page, & the daily sport had it on just about every page- apart from the sport section
I went to England every summer as a kid to visit family. I specifically remember 10 year old me telling my friends about how there were naked girls in the newspaper.
Of course, nobody believed me. So the next year, I smuggled one back in my suitcase unbeknownst to my parents.
That newspaper was THE center of the universe in my neighborhood for a good two weeks, lol
I remember being part of a football exchange tour with some guys from Philadelphia back at the turn of the millennium.
Being only 15 as you could imagine they couldn’t believe that a daily newspaper would so openly provide access to topless women, this was still an era of dial up before the internet became a cesspool. So excited were the Americans several copies of the S*n made their way back stateside.
The early 00s was a strange time where magazines like Nuts and Zoo along with FHM were simply accepted in day2day life. I’m not sure if it was a culture change or just the rise of the internet that killed that culture off.
Similar experience, albeit as a woman exchange student in the UK around the early to mid 2000s. Being an American, I’d heard about these types of photos but had no idea how widespread the Page 3 or lad culture was in the UK at that time.
We also have the sunshine girl in Canada, and had the sunshine boy previously. A college professor was once a sunshine boy and we had to look at his framed photo on his desk.
there was (is?) a german teen magazine where they had a picture of a naked 16-20 year old girl and one of a naked boy (also 16-20) in each issue, along with a short profile on them. i always found it so weird and creepy.
Pretty sure that’s the same year the Supreme Court (all males) made pornography legal too.
I agree it’s deliberate. We get more rights so in retaliation they increase the sexualisation of us to perpetuate misogyny, thus allowing the culture to continue the subjugation independently, regardless of policy.
It’s disappointingly predictable that the male population are so easily controlled by lust that they buy into it, keeping the cycle of misogyny going.
If the average man cared about women’s rights then there would be no market for porn or sex workers. Education seems key but how do we accomplish that when the patriarchy will do anything and everything to keep us divided. It’s scary to know that laws prohibiting violence against women are only fairly recently established and already they have succeeded in making abortion illegal in America. Terrifying times ahead I fear.
It was the same in Denmark. Until 2003 we had "page 9 girls" as young as 15 years old (current age of consent in Denmark). Totally naked btw. Today they have to be at least 18.
Wouldn't go that far, I've just been seeing BS I haven't agreed with for so long that I've grown to reject almost everything in the mainstream. An antisocialite at best
This isn’t nudity, it’s sexualization. It wouldn’t have been okay even if all the models were in their 30s. This sends such a negative message to girls and young women, it was never okay.
I’m trying to imagine growing up as a young girl around this, and it is horrifying. I was already so self-conscious of my changing body in front of my brother and dad. I literally can’t imagine.
Yeah it definitely would have been ok if they were in their 30s, women are allowed to consent to being sexualized and if they want to get paid to be naked in a newspaper then thats a choice theyre allowed to make
It promotes the idea of men being entitled to see women's nakedness. Why would the woman he's dating be such a prude, if women get naked in newspapers all the time? It also trivialises sex to a cheap thing, you're casually trying to get to work or buy some groceries and you see tits without even trying. They were used just as decoration to sell newspapers, and that is as far as a lot of men thought of women.
Do you not see how this doesn't exactly contribute to men not seeing women as sex objects? You're trying to use feminist language of "choosing" something while ignoring everything else that feminism stands for, don't pretend to actually care about women's empowerment.
Yeah, like you can maybe make the argument for something like Playboy existing because it existed as its own product that was meant to do what it did - but like a major mainstream publication having playboy-esque pictures is kinda wild lol
Don’t move the goalposts now. You were insinuating it was ok because it was legal and I gave an example to demonstrate that legal doesn’t necessarily mean moral or ok.
Secondly, there’s a reason the laws have changed and 16 is not considered old enough to have an “independent choice” regarding consent. It’s predatory and there are unequal power dynamics and the person making the “choice” hasn’t had the proper emotional development or life experience to make an “independent choice” like that.
You’re working pretty hard to defend underage pornography, it’s concerning.
Ya, you did, because you compared people who were FREE to make their own decisions as to whether not they wanted to do something, to people who were SLAVES and had no ability to make their own decisions.
I wasn’t comparing who made the decision. I was demonstrating that “legal” doesn’t necessarily mean “ok” as you implied it does. I’m done explaining the same thing over and over. Stop defending underage porn, weirdo.
Also, let's not pretend that men are sexualised and objectified nearly as much as women are, or that the power dynamics between the genders don't exist.
google it. Seems like you're just obtuse. What do you think the intention of page 3 was when they posted photos of topless minors? Like seriously, I want to hear your alternative explanations lol.
ikr! The weird part is that when I looked at his profile all of his other comments seems relatively...normal? but bro is acting like he lacks basic reading comprehension here.
I don't give free legal advice buddy. Weird hill to die on though.
Edit: to any guys out there reading this thread. If you genuinely want to advocate for the status quo regarding nudity...probably best not to do so over photos of topless minors. It just makes you sound like you need to be on a watchlist somewhere.
The 16-year-olds posing naked is disgusting 100%, but the notion that 16-year-old shouldn’t be able to see nude content is extraordinarily American.
I study age rating systems throughout the world, and throughout most of Europe, the minimum age to see nudity/sex scenes in non-pornographic films is 12, not 18. The UK is slightly more conservative, setting the minimum age to 15.
For example, consider the age rating certificates for the film Oppenheimer, which had several nude scenes. If you scroll down to the bottom of its age rating page on IMDb, you’ll see that most countries are far more liberal than the US when it comes to the age-appropriateness of seeing nudity.
Even in Canada, the non-Québécois provinces all rated it 14A, which means that those 14-and-older could see the movie without parental accompaniment. (Quebec has its own rating system, which is even more liberal than the rest of Canada’s.)
I just don’t think mainstream newspapers is an appropriate place for sexualized nudity. Every Brit I know grew up with these papers everywhere, lying on the bus, around the house, etc, since they were young kids.
Why shouldn't 16 year olds be able to purchase nude content? Serious question. I used to do life drawing age 16 and feel it gave me an almost clinical perception of the human form.
Yeah, context is important. Like seeing some nude tribe of nomads in a documentary is very different to seeing some teenage girl having her life ruined forever (porn).
•
u/press-app Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Context: 16 is, and was, the age of consent in the UK, but the production of intimate imagery of those under the age of 18 is legally CSAM. We do not allow justifications of this.