Time to close the cover on Page 3

ONE DAY last summer, a Brighton writer called Lucy Anne Holmes noticed that the most prominent photograph of a woman in The Sun newspaper was not Jessica Ennis, the brilliant young athlete who had just won gold at the London Olympics, but an unknown young woman with no clothes on.

Inside Lucy Anne Holmes’ head, something went ping. Why was this newspaper, with its circulation of almost 2.5m, still offering images of women as sexualised decoration, rather than highlighting female achievement? No More Page 3 was born.

Using social media, Holmes got a petition going. Turns out lots of other people were not keen on naked women being served up as visual entertainment in an everyday publication that is stocked not with the top-shelf porn, but with the rest of the family newspapers. So far 102,910 people [as on May 24, 2013] have signed the online campaign which is asking The Sun’s editor, Dominic Mohan, to shelve Page 3. So far, he hasn’t.