I keep seeing twitter campaigns about things like the Sun newspapers Page 3 girls. Young women show their breasts for money. It's a long tradition in the UK and harmless. I don't buy the paper and couldn't care less about it. Other papers have plenty of nearly naked celebs with their boobs falling out of their websites and papers, there's even a whole subculture about which actress got drunk and "accidentally" let photographers take pictures of her knickerless nether regions getting into or out of cars - and that appears in all of the papers. Is this worse? Or is it no surprise that women have genitalia?
Now we have a change.org petition against it at a time when research has shown that women in the UK earn on average £5000 less than men.
But of course, in our isolated society, where everybody is supposed to shift for themselves, that's tough shit. It's easier to get indignant about some prurient nonsense than the real wrongs, because the real wrongs are much harder to work on. Like changing sexist language stops discrimination, in which case why is there this income gap? It's window dressing, liberals love banning things because they think it makes a difference - no it doesn't, it just means things have been banned. It means that speech is even more restricted, and grown up, difficult discussions about things that may offend people become even harder.
It's easy to get het up about breasts in a "family newspaper", and easy to campaign about it. If I was going to spend energy women's issues, which I see to be far more about class than gender, I'd be shouting about the child poverty implied by that TUC report. If some young women make a few quid out of being ogled by idiots - so what? I don't care about the breasts - I'm an adult. When my kids were small I was more worried about them seeing violence on the news than nudity - we're not Victorians and we shouldn't be scared of sex or sexuality.
The blatant racism in the Express and Daily Mail, plus the damage they do misrepresenting health research for headlines is far more pressing. But that would be real, instead of some chimeric campaign covering some tits. And they still have the right to say what they say, I believe in free speech, but I also believe in being able to reply without fear of censorship, whatever the issue.Let's stop being so prudish about people's bodies, we all have them, it's no big deal. We all probably saw breasts some time when we were too small to care about ogling them - so what? If one paper shows the nearly topless celeb with an inch of cotton hiding her nipples and another doesn't, does it send a different message, if there is a message? Are we supposed to insist everyone wears a burkah? Are you serious?