British tabloids’ ‘Page 3 girl’ is topless no longer

The Page 3 Girl, a feature of British tabloids for decades that allowed readers to turn the front page and stare at a topless woman over breakfast or on their commute to work, is getting covered up.
The Daily Star, the final holdout in the market, has been trying a nipple-free Page 3 since the beginning of this month — although women still figure prominently on that page.
Topless women on Page 3 have endured in British tabloids since the 1970s, and are associated with The Sun, the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper with a circulation of about 1.4 million. The Sun revelled in the controversy around the images. When The Sun started covering up the photos in 2015, The Daily Star, then owned by Express newspapers, doubled down by giving its readers the option of receiving an image of its Page 3 Girl that day on their cellphones.
The feature was largely a product of a belief that “the great consumers were men and they needed to appeal to men,” said Roy Greenslade, a former features editor at The Sun.
Still, for many years, it helped propel celebrities like Samantha Fox, Katie Price and Linda Lusardi to stardom, and many women submitted pictures to the newspaper in the hope of being featured, Greenslade said. Over time, the complaints of sexism became louder. Clare Short, a minister in Tony Blair’s government, proposed legislation to end the feature in 1986 while a member of Parliament.
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