Tits

Page 3 is back; apparently there’s an image of a young lady baring her breasts in today’s edition of The Sun, the thought of which makes me smile. I won’t be buying it – I find that particular newspaper a vile and obnoxious publication – but it’s one in the eye for the numerous campaign groups who seem to think they have some God given right to tell us what we can and can’t think.

As far as I’m concerned, Page 3 constitutes an agreement between three parties; the young lady to whom the pair of tits belongs, the publisher who wishes to photograph and display that pair of tits, and the customer who wishes to pay to look at the pair of tits. Three individuals, all of whom are happy with the arrangement, get what they want.

But then you have a fourth person inviting them self into the equation; someone who has absolutely no business sticking their nose in, yet can’t seem to keep it out. This person wants to stop the young lady from earning a living, to censor the publication and dictate its content, and to prevent the customer from getting what they pay for. Holy hell – our freedom and liberty is under attack. Someone call the UN.

A couple of weeks ago an atrocity was committed in Paris, and the media were quick to market it as an assault on our freedom of expression. Plenty of folk were frothing at the mouth, screaming about how it is our right to offend people. A fortnight later, many of these same people – who still have their ‘Je Suis Charlie’ avatars displayed on Twitter – are whining about how Page 3 ought to be banned.

Freedom of expression works both ways; it enables you to say things other people might not like, but it also allows other people to say things you might not like. You can’t have your cake and eat it. You can’t holler about the rights of French cartoonists to insult someone’s religion one minute, then go apeshit at the fact there’s a pair of tits in a newspaper the next. If you do, it makes you a hypocrite, and no one likes a hypocrite.

Our freedom of expression is most certainly under attack, but the perpetrators of this attack are not Islamic fundamentalists. No, they are wealthy white folk that are doing the damage; they are people in ‘No More Page 3’ T-shirts, they are government ministers who are steadily sneaking more and more sexual activities into the obscenity law and banning British pornography makers from depicting them on camera.

There are companies in this country who manufacture weapons. They make billions from assembling missiles and bombs, the sole purpose of which is to kill human beings, and this is entirely legal and above board. Yet if a woman tries to make a few quid out of taking a picture of herself sitting on someone’s face, then she’s breaking the law and could go to prison. You can profit from murder, but not from consensual sex. Something is very, very wrong in this society of ours.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Frank Zappa; “What’s more dangerous – people who celebrate sexuality, or people who make bad laws?”