“Page Three of the Sun, and specifically the Sun, is considered to be the pinnacle of glamour modelling. We take very, very, very few girls. They need real boobs that are great, they need to have great skin, great hair, great teeth, lovely eyes. You’ve really got to be nigh on perfect to be a Page Three girl, but fortunately, there’s lots of ace people out there.”
– Alison Webster, photographer for the Sun

Where has this notion that there is such a thing as a perfect body come from? It took me a long time to realise it, but a universal perfect figure does not exist. (Sometimes, I wonder if I have actually realised at all.)
I spent most of my school years being taunted for not being “the right size” and it still has an effect: even now, three years after I left sixth-form and the teasing stopped, I catch myself thinking “I wish I looked like that.” I compare myself to friends who are thinner than me and I worry constantly that I’m not good enough for this or that, or worse, someone.

It even extends beyond my body image: five people in the last six weeks, two of them in the same place, have tried to get me onto a dancefloor and I’ve said no, instead sitting at the side and watching, but wishing I had the confidence to say yes.

My sister started high school last autumn and will be twelve in the summer. She isn’t perfectly skinny and nor is she built to be. Her personality is completely different to mine and I doubt she’ll stand for any crap she’s given about how she looks, but I worry for her nonetheless. I don’t want to see her struggle with her body image the way I and many other girls do.
The TV programme that the above quote came from (Page Three Teens, aired on BBC Three on Tuesday evening) claimed that girls as young as 13 write into magazines asking for modelling work.
 

“The girls who want to be glamour models, they do seem to see it as empowering and empowering for them is making a lot of money, but that’s not empowering, it’s just being in a picture that blokes can drool over, and that’s definitely not empowering for women.”
– Lucy Cave, Heat magazine

Some feminists call out for this, and other kinds of work labelled degrading or dangerous to women, to be censored or criminalised: I disagree. Clearly, cases involving anyone endangered by their work, or women bought, sold and forced to work are different, but when it comes to magazines advertising the perfect figure and women who choose to pose for saucy photographs and dance for cash, censorship and criminalising workers isn’t going to make it go away.

It may feel empowering to the women posing in the photographs, whether that be because they’re earning salaries equivalent to office workers and teachers or because they are near enough to the perfect figure to be chosen to model, but it’s the consumers that suffer: not only has the media created the idea of what a woman should be like, it has created what men are supposed to be interested in.

“This celebrity is fat, but doesn’t this one look great?!” (Next week, they’ll be too thin.)
This is a classic example. Comments on the article include:

I am sorry but she is just fat. She should cover up.
- Steve Goodwin, Leeds, UK

Rubbish! Every female in my family is morbidly obese like Bea. I have stayed a size 4 at age 40 by exercising daily and NEVER eating junk food. While it may be true she inherited the body shape, her obesity is due to her poor habits of over eating and being inactive.
- Rebecca, Iowa, USA

It doesn’t just stop at body shape: Cosmopolitan’s main features at the moment are the Cosmo guide to dating, the hot celebrity hair guide, the sex tips special and whether Sienna Miller in leather is hot or not. Zoo’s Hot List links to photos of International Babe of the Day for Wednesday, where the summarising text amounts to “Okay, well we know a few things: 1) She’s from Australia 2) she looks great in a bikini and 3) Well, what the hell else do you need? Look at the pics!”

That says it all for me.

Unsurprisingly, these magazines are mostly published by the same company (formerly EMAP, now Bauer). They list their publications as Closer, Heat, Grazia, FHM, Arena, Zoo and more (amongst others).
Womens’ magazines are full of adverts for makeup and perfume, and the lads’ mags are selling beer; these magazines are owning not just femininity but masculinity as well: consumers of both types of magazine are being told they should be buying into skinny women and stereotypes.

I don’t profess to know how to go about contest the content of these magazines calling out their producers for the capitalists they blatantly are but it doesn’t seem to me that censoring them by moving them to the top shelf or stickering them is going to do much more than make it harder or more embarrassing to purchase them.