The Sun: Bare breasts is a double-edged weapon

Forty-four years after it was introduced, full-page images of topless models cavorting and frolicking on exotic beaches or at pool parties will not be seen in the Page 3 of the Rupert Murdoch-owned British and Irish tabloid The Sun. Instead of bare and buxom female chests, the page will now showcase buxom female chests from behind the purdah of the itsy-bitsy brassiere.

All because of the 'No More Page 3' campaign by mostly young British 'feminists', for whom this pornification of culture was loathsome. This unbearable toplessness of being they were averse to, mostly because men - white, upper class, business class, black, ghetto-born, white-trash, tattoo- and multiple-ring sporting trigger-happy jerks, Asian devils, Asian software engineers, Indian and Pakistani takeaway-wallahs - were all united in safeguarding their brethren's right to gawk at the female body jutting out from those pages for years.

For the longest, The Sun was the most-read daily in the United Kingdom, toppled by The Daily Mail as recently as in 2013. It's a fixture on the London Underground, and everyone, from suited executives to hooded and pimply teenagers, flaunts it as if it were the Holy Grail. Before the world was colonised by the LED screens of smartphones, The Sun was the smart thing to wield, almost a secret code of brotherhood among men otherwise plotting to overthrow each other in a sort of permanent game of thrones.  

But The Sun isn't the only one doing this. Tabloids world over, including here in India, swear by the 'sideboob' (the image of the skimpily clad female celebrity next to the screaming headline in fonts exceeding the size 100)! Moreover, nude and skimpily clad women generate the traffic, as it were, in a culture obsessed with cutting, slicing, airbrushing, photoshopping the female body to squeeze it into changing, often unattainable ideals of the 'model vital stats.'

So, is the successful climaxing of the 'No More Page 3' campaign an orgasmic high for feminists all over the world? Yes, and no. Because it's not nudity that's the problem here. It's rather the (sadly correct) assumption that bare boobs can turn otherwise thinking men, even women, into juvenile consumers of the uber-sexualised, hypernaked female bodies. It's different from full-fledged pornography because it deals with only the semi-nude, over-proportioned female body and does not talk about the male body. Hell, it can hardly imagine that the male body, too, can arouse, or sell, given The Sun's illustrious history of homophobia, xenophobia and myriad other recalcitrant phobias that were best left to the twentieth century, but that refuse to autocombust in the flaming light of technologically-guided twenty-first century enlightenment.

British MPs across the board, many of whom might have been pictured engrossed in sizing up the Page 3 girls on their way to the Houses of Parliament, have welcome the move, saying it was long due. But that's just routine British hypocrisy, perhaps a close second to the Saudi foreign minister walking hand in hand with Francois Holland and Angela Merkel at the Paris Unity March to commemorate the slain Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. It takes some balls, pardon my French, to challenge a British national institution, much like Sam Mendes forcing James Bond into a midlife crisis, taking to asexuality and Oedipal attachment to M as an antidote.

But such national institutions too are felled by time. Slavery, woman and black disenfranchisement, not educating women, sati, were all national institutions once upon a time. You might say equating a harmless seminude on front or third page of a tabloid with such mighty evils is way too far-fetched. But is it? Because this is not the scatological excess of a Charlie Hebdo satire, in which the ample rear of Kim Kardashianis on an equal if wiggly plane of Prophet Muhammad's (imagined) bum. This is censorship of the actual female body at the altar of the manufactured, made-for-consumption image of the same.

However, am I happy that the Page 3 has been scrapped? Frankly, I don't know. Always a contrarian and steering clear of certainties, there's very little in the continents of commercial expression that I find truly offensive. In the age of slut-walks and Femen feministas, the bare breast is a double-edged weapon. The crucial point here is choice and right to the body.