The argument for bare breasts

22 January 2015 - 02:20 By Stephen Bayley, ©The Daily Telegraph
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THE MESSAGE OF DEMOCRACY: 'Liberty Leading the People', by Eugène Delacroix, celebrates the 1830 revolution that toppled King Charles X of France
THE MESSAGE OF DEMOCRACY: 'Liberty Leading the People', by Eugène Delacroix, celebrates the 1830 revolution that toppled King Charles X of France
Image: WIKIPEDIA

After many years on the attack, the naked female breast is now in retreat - at least in UK tabloid The Sun, which quietly published its final Page 3 girl on Friday.

A discreet veil has been drawn over a British tradition of harmless, popular smut that goes back to Chaucer's Wife of Bath .

There are several absurdities here but chief among them is how the naked breast is now read as a symbol of women's oppression, when once it was seen as a universal symbol of popular liberty.

Eugène Delacroix's great 1830 canvas, Liberty Leading the People, has the personification of "liberté" storming the barricades with a breast exposed. This was immediately interpreted as a potent democratic message. She would have been less convincing with her gabardine mac buttoned up to the neck.

Another great French artist, the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, made a famous bust of a magnificent African woman to advertise the anti-slavery movement. Pourquoi Naître Esclave? (Why born a slave?) shows the newly liberated female hero with proudly exposed breasts as an exhilarating demo of freedom.

And the magnificently batty Isadora Duncan, founder of modern dance, revealed her communist sympathies on stage in Boston in 1910. Unfurling a red flag, and then unfurling one of her breasts, she said: "This is red . and so am I!"

Last year, Iranian and Arab women staged a nude demonstration at the Louvre to protest against Islamic fundamentalism. Elsewhere in Europe, the radical Femen group go topless to attack patriarchy and theocracy.

The Sun began publishing Page 3 in 1970. As a boost to circulation, topless girls, looking as fresh and innocent as a toothpaste ad, were a publishing masterstroke. Significantly, the breast of the first Page 3 model, while indisputably uncovered, is seen in subtle side view only.

The same year, pioneer feminist Betty Friedan organised The Women's Strike for Equality in New York. Two years later, women took a real strike for equality when a nude Burt Reynolds, complete with objectified chest hair, was published as a centrefold in Cosmopolitan magazine. This was the same period in which feminist author-activist Germaine Greer regularly posed nude herself, often quite horrifically so, for the counter-culture magazine Oz.

Over its 45 years, and befitting a minor art form, Page 3 developed a culture and tradition all its own. Indeed, for 33 of those years, the dominant photographer was Beverley Goodwin, who imposed a style that, at least when compared with the squalor of internet porn - or Greer in Oz - might even be called chaste. It was, in its way, the equivalent of "Chin up, girls!" Only someone looking to be offended could, surely, take offence.

What really caused the demise of Page 3? My own Sun-reading habit was never well-developed, but 10 years ago when I started frequenting a favourite Chelsea coffee bar, I always had a sneaky look at the Neapolitan proprietor's every-ready, dog-eared copy while waiting for my latte. I was actually rather surprised to find that Page 3 still existed. It looked quaint then and looks even more quaint now.

In any case, the contents of Page 3 are retreating only behind the newspaper's online paywall, where connoisseurs of the lightest and fluffiest of soft porn may still indulge themselves.

Only old-fashioned "liberals" are still outraged by decorous nudity.

Five years ago, after I wrote my book Woman As Design, Greer spent two pages in The Guardian attacking me for having an "objectified" view of the female form. She invited the global sisterhood to flood my e-mail with pictures of their "unsupported breasts" to reverse the (idealised) prejudices she claimed I held. I received only a single nude image, and that was from a handsome woman in Australia with a message saying: "I think Germaine is mad and I thought you might enjoy this."

While few people will seriously regret the passing of Page 3, nonetheless something has been lost and very little worthwhile has been gained. The fusspots, busybodies and ideologues who supported "No More Page 3" have won a victory over . what exactly? It was rather like the Puritans who wanted to ban bear-baiting not because it caused pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the audience.

The naked breast is now in retreat, but only one thing is certain about the history of British manners and taste in which it plays so important a part: things change. It will return.

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