I want to talk about choice. Women’s choice. In  the wake of the CUSU motion calling colleges to boycott the Sun as a result of page 3 and the discussions around the petition asking the Wyvern’s to cancel the jelly-wrestling, women’s choice is something that needs to be discussed.

I’m going to start off by using a different but well-aired issue relating to women’s choice - that of female body hair removal. 

Most women have hair growing on their body. Many women remove all of it with wax, razors, epilators, cream and even lasers. All of the products required to remove it are expensive and most methods of removal are painful and inconvenient. And yet the majority of women still persist in removing some or all of their body hair.

Why do some women choose to remove it? The answer is obvious, but I’m going to go through it anyway. It’s because the mainstream media’s image of a woman has no body hair. She’s silky smooth, pearly white and oh so delightfully fragranced. As women, we’re congratulated day in and day out by society for being beautiful and dismissed if we don’t meet the impossible standards. The pressure to remove hair and thereby conform to mainstream models of feminine beauty is huge and ever-present; we see it grinning out of magazines and winking at us from billboards.  It’s everywhere.

Meaning, of course, that the majority of women make the choice to remove it.

And I don’t blame them. I don’t shave because I have better things to do than arduously drag a slicing razor over my armpits and I have better things to spend my money on than razors. But this doesn’t change the fact that my god it’s difficult to be hairy sometimes. I’ve had people turn their nose up at my armpits and wrinkle their brow at my legs.  My body hair has the power to make people view me as undesirable in a society that fetishizes women’s beauty. And, although most of the time I don’t care what people think, sometimes it’s hard to stick out all the time. So, sometimes I decide to cut myself some slack and shave it all off.

And so, it’s clear then, that when I shave, it’s not completely and solely me that’s making the choice to. Social norms are making it for me. Our beauty obsessed, hair-free social norms.  And this is what I want to say about women’s choice. In a society that so clearly defines what women should look like and how we should behave, it’s very, very hard to make a choice that transcends societal pressure.

If we transfer this recognition of the difficulty of really making a choice, totally for yourself, over to Page 3 then the pressure that informs the decision that the models make when they choose to appear in the public eye becomes clearer. Women are told, from a very early age, that being sexy is important. Hair removal comes into this, but it’s also connected to smiling, wearing makeup, dressing in clothes that are deemed sexy, interacting in certain ways and, even, not revealing too formidable an intelligence.

When you do all these things, you fit the mainstream model of femininity. It’s great. You’re complimented by everyone. Everything reinforces that you have made it. And woah, does that feel good. However, once again, the upkeep is hard work and sometimes you might not want to smile or paint your face or not argue back. So it’s clear that, once again, you get loads of validation if you choose the socially accepted route, something like dismissal if you don’t.

So the idea that the models get to make the choice totally freely suddenly becomes a lot more complicated.

It’s not to say that, take away all the pressure from society, no woman would choose to shave, pose topless for the Sun or wrestle in jelly. I bet many women would. It’s that this choice is not totally freely made when society tells women what we should do.

And this is one of the (many) reasons why the Sun’s Page 3 is problematic. As well as the blatant objectification, the removal of the woman’s intellectual capabilities through the News in Briefs section and the unrealistic body model it reinforces, the daily image in the Sun is representative of the horrible social pressure that limits women’s ability to make choices freely. Furthermore, Page 3 amplifies expectations already felt daily by women and therefore further impinges upon our ability to freely choose what we, as women, want to do.

And this makes the whole circle carry on and on and on.

Unless we do something about it.  And we have. Thanks Cambridge.

 

Varsity Platform is a new series intended to allow campaigns and organisations in Cambridge to defend their causes. If you would like to participate, email comment@varsity.co.uk and give a voice to your campaign. 

Also on Varsity Online: Varsity Features interview the leader of the Page 3 campaign: http://www.varsity.co.uk/lifestyle/5920