The woman, pictured in a bikini, positioned carefully by the editors to invite leering. She was killed. The headline, sensationalistic and lurid. The scare quotes, trivialising violence.
Her name was Reeva Steenkamp, not that you’d know from the reportage. It’s irrelevant to them.
This is hardly the first time I’ve been appalled by the lows to which this vile rag can sink. I am shocked and sickened, but not surprised. This is par for the course for The Sun. This is not new, merely different.
I have spent the last few days arguing with defenders of the No More Page 3 campaign, and when I see this I wonder how anyone can continue to argue that the page beneath this is the problem.
It’s how these bastards operate. I don’t doubt that this will sell well, and our disgust will be dismissed. It happens every single fucking time they do this.
Come and perv on the dead woman. Stay for the sensationalism and trivialisation. It’s just another method of exploitation that can be marketed, and our society is fucked enough to buy.
Another angry woman 
I already heard people relegating her to what glamour mags she’d been in on the train tonight. They got a NatLecture. Fuck this shit. As @Trishie_D said: “Her name was Reeva Steenkamp. She wasn’t just a model, or one of FHM’s sexiest women, or Oscar Pistorius’ girlfriend. Her name was Reeva Steenkamp and she had a law degree and campaigned for rape victims. And she is the victim.”
WORD.
Word, on a pile of buttery word mash, sprinkled with word cheese.
More wordy words.
WORD.
Obviously, I’m with you on most of this. It’s “Never mind that a real person’s died. Look at her in her bikini – she’s a bit of alright, isn’t she? More inside!”
But aren’t the scare quotes are just that: not there to trivialise violence, but to cover their backs in case it turns out not to have been murder? I’m sure they’d leave them out if they felt they could. (Though of course a better way to deal with that is if you’re not sure there’s a murder, don’t say murders; say kills or something else neutral instead.)
While you’ve probably identified the reason behind the scare quotes, you’ve not identified its effect: trivialising violence.
I was wondering whether you’d get the point that you’re arguing with the wrong side when you take on as *opponents* people who don’t like the Sun and don’t like the Sun’s objectification / dehumanisation of women. But apparently not.
A woman is dead. Please stop trying to use this as a recruitment exercise for your liberal campaign.
Reeva Steenkamp was killed. And this is how the Sun treat her. The entire foul rag needs to burn and you know it.
“Please stop trying to use this as a recruitment exercise for your liberal campaign.”
Correction: NMP3 is not my campaign. Nor am I particularly interested in recruiting people to it. I just don’t see the feminists who support NMP3 as enemies or even opponents. If I think there are better things they could do than campaign against NMP3, I certainly think there are much better things to do than to attack them.
“A woman is dead.”
Yes. My blogpost yesterday: Reeva Steenkamp is dead pointed out that it’s not just The Sun that dismissed her.
So, are we going to burn a lot of things to the ground (metaphorically), or are we going to continue in just complaining about page 3?
Your choice: you’re the one who brought the NMP3 campaign up in this post. You want the focus there, or not?
I think the point is that if the people who want to get rid of Page 3 get everything they want, pop the campaign corks and declare total victory, this front page looks exactly the same. It’s not that they are enemies or opponents, it’s that they are spending their time campaigning to change something which will not, when it comes down to it, make a vast amount of difference.
Yes, this.
Agreed. But, there’s someone on my street who campaigns quite hard for more litter bins in the local park. If she achieves her goal and declares victory, this will not make a vast amount of difference. I don’t opt to spend time supporting her but I don’t see any reason to spend my valuable time campaigning to stop her or complaining about what she’s doing, either. As I said on the previous thread: Clare Short or Dominic Mohan? Easy choice.
I think we all know the REAL tragedy here is that there is one less sexy woman in the world to provide boners…
Funk that.
RIP Reeva x
I think the bin analogy misses the point. If your neighbour was campaigning on bins at the point a global corporation was planning to dump a large amount of toxic waste in the park lake, for instance, that might be more analogous to how stavvers sees the Sun.
Page Three is a small part of the sneering, objectifying, lurid way in which the Sun covers women in the public eye. If feminists ‘won’ on Page Three and celebrated that, the impression might be given that the battle was over and that the Sun, dead model front pages and all, was now just another perfectly reputable choice of reading material.
If what is necessary as an end goal is to destroy the Sun (yeah, that sentence sounds quite Supervillain-y) then harping on one tiny aspect of its misogyny and then holding the metaphorical press conference on an aircraft carrier after that one issue is sorted out is actively harmful.
I rarely even glance at The Sun, but christ – this is truly disgusting.
Reblogged this on Mitherings from Morningside.
Please join the biggest anti-Sun page on Facebook. This is a disgusting front page, Dominic Mohan should be genuinely, deeply ashamed. However, I suspect it’s an emotion of which he is not capable.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/274168775057/