A few weeks ago The Old Angel pub was forced to cancel a Valentine’s Day event it was organising called “Bag a Slag, Grab a Hag”. The organiser was one of the female staff and it was just a bit of fun, offering those taking part free drinks.
The important thing to bear in mind here is that you can safely bet that a significant proportion of those taking part would have been neither slags or hags. That’s why it was simply a “fun” event. But that didn’t stop the local Feminist Action Network (FAN) representative, Ruth Greenburg, from asking:
Is that all women are – slags and hags?
You can safely conclude that FAN is completely devoid of any sense of humour whatsoever. And Nottingham City Council also showed its true colours yet again by trumping up the charges and effectively threatening the landlord’s licence.
It was interesting, therefore, to see this new BBC story today reporting that student feminist campaigners had succeeded in getting newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Star banned from Student Union shops on the University campus. And all because of Page 3.
Francesca Garforth, who led the campaign group University of Nottingham Feminists with Jo Lockwood Estrin, said it was simply wrong to use suggestive pictures as a way of selling papers.
“It takes the idea that this woman has an opinion and is allowed to voice it because she’s also got her breasts out,” she said.
Miss Estrin said: “The amount of people it harms – one in seven women on university campuses in the UK are raped or seriously sexually assaulted and we do believe that it is a link to these kinds of images being normalised.
“Seeing these images on a day-to-day basis normalises the idea that women are there and voiceless.”
Well, I suppose everyone is entitled to their 15 minutes of fame. Meanwhile, the women who choose to appear on Page 3 will, of course, continue to make wads of money in spite of Garforth and Estrin’s “victory”. And the students will just buy their copies of the papers somewhere else.