Half the adult population of the planet has breasts, a fact the other half’s been struggling with for quite some time. Now, I don’t need to bang on about patriarchy and the objectification of women in much detail, partly because I’ve done it enough already and partly because it’s obvious and everywhere. It’s there in our horrific record on domestic violence, in the difference in salaries for women and men, in the difference in pocket money for girls and boys, in the attitude that says a man’s a player and a woman’s a slag, in pornography that casts women as sluts to be simultaneously lusted after and looked down on, in the pornification of pop culture that has singers writhing in bikinis to sell records, in the mutilation of women’s bodies pumped full of silicone and collagen and numbed with botox. Turns out I needed to bang on about it all. Always better to be sure.

You’ll be aware of how six days a week The Sun newspaper prints photos of young, topless women. It’s been doing this since 1970, when it decided breasts were just as newsworthy as your average pre-budget statement. On top of the obvious reasons why this is shitty (see above) it’s the incongruity that makes it so troubling. The Sun puts breasts on the breakfast table, on the bus on the way to work, in cafés and canteens at lunchtime. It puts women next to men looking at tits, wherever they happen to be. If you’re tramping around the back alleys of Amsterdam and you happen upon a bare breast or two there’s at least a context. A sleazy, exploitative context, obviously, but one that says there’s a place for everything and everything in its place. But I’ve been in a social work office packed full of right-ons and walked into a lunch room and been walloped in the eyes by a pair of boobs staring up at me from the table because some guy’s left his copy of The Sun lying around. People, this is not cool.

Page 3 is a leftover from a bygone age, the sole survivor from an era when we put tits on beer cans, where buying a pack of nuts in a pub could show up a bit of nipple on a backboard, when objectifying women was end-of-the-pier fun for everyone involved except the women and the pier and humanity at large, when enough people said it was okay to convince themselves it was. Now it sits there, a former institution out of time, a ragged has-been with no idea of how the world’s moved on and how sad it looks and how little it would be missed if it buggered off. Like David Hasselfhoff.

And this isn’t just about patriarchy, obviously. It’s about the Murdoch empire’s using of people across its output. Of course it has young women take their tops off to sell papers. Of course it sees women as just tits on legs. This is the same group of people who said a lousy comedian killed and ate a hamster, who said Elton John did rent boys, who ran a story on Charlotte Church’s breasts when she was 15 opposite an article about paedophilia, who told the world you can’t get AIDS from straight sex, who said the Hillsborough disaster was about a bunch of Scousers pissing on the police, who hacked a murdered girl’s voicemail, who outed politicians to highlight the “gay mafia” running the country, who called mentally ill people “bonkers”, who claimed Al Qaeda wanted to blow up Coronation Street, who demonise asylum seekers as grasping and fraudulent. This is a sleazy, nasty group of people doing a sleazy, nasty thing among all its other sleazy, nasty things.

Past campaigns to get rid of Page 3 have not gone well. When Clare Short had a go The Sun called her a fat, ugly killjoy, and the House of Commons let her Bill die on its arse. There may be hope, however, in the new, social networked generation. Lucy Holmes is whipping up a storm on Change.org via Twitter and Facebook. Her petition to scrap Page 3 is getting a decent amount of coverage in the right-on, leftie media and has a decent momentum about it, getting almost 10,000 signatures in just 24 days. If people keep it up we could get to the point where enough of us say, “Enough of this shit” and enough people listen and it stops.

That’s not to say I’ve not got my doubts. For this thing to work we have to demonstrate that the effect of keeping Page 3 is worse than the effect of getting rid of it. For this thing to work it needs to be big. As it stands, even with 9,771 signatures, we’re outnumbered by the millions of paying customers who buy The Sun, tits and all. The Murdoch crew don’t care about people or women or feminism or patriarchy or equality or the sexualisation of young girls or actually any principle except making money. A small bunch of right-ons saying its wrong isn’t going to cut it. It needs massive numbers, it needs to show something in the way of consequences, it needs Jeremy Clarkson, not Germaine Greer, saying this shit has to stop or we risk being dismissed as 9,771 fat, ugly killjoys.

We can help with the numbers bit. We can sign the petition, than spam hell out of Twitter, Facebook and, to a lesser extent, that Google thing no one likes to get others to sign it and share it. This isn’t yer average mockable armchair activism; 10,000 signatures in three weeks is viral enough to get excited about. If we all give this a bash it might actually work, the British press might actually take a step towards growing up, and humanity might actually shuffle forward an inch or two. Get on it.

Photo credit: @nomorepage3