Here’s a transcript of a video the Sun put up a while ago, perhaps partly to celebrate 40 years of page 3, and perhaps partly out of fear that that their greatest achievement is now under threat from the slowly growing NMP3 movement, and others…
Hello boys…
Look at your woman
Now back at me
Now at your woman
Now back at me
Sadly she isn’t me
But that’s ok, because if you keep reading page three every day I’ll be in your hands smiling at you as if you were with me
Look down
Back up
Where are you?
You’re on a beach with the woman you’d secretly love your woman to be like
What’s in your hands?
Back at me
I have them…
They’re my coconuts, with 2 VIP tickets to that match you have to see
Look again
The tickets are now beers
Anything is possible when you read page three and imagine that I’m your lady
I’m on a… car? [a joke ending of some kind]
So there it is: Rupert Murdoch just disrespected my woman. This is part of what the empire does. This is part of how our consumer economy works: it undermines sacred human relationships by placing lucrative narratives of lust and insecurity between people.
While this is really just a norm of mass culture, the Sun is almost an anomaly because it does this without any pretense at subtlety. It’s over-eager. It’s like that one guy in a local mafia collective who’s crazy and threatens to pull the whole thing down with his psychotic whims.
They openly cultivate an abusive relationship with their women readers, telling them everyday that their men will not look to them, but to Murdoch for what they really need. They assume they can treat their women readers like dirt and still hold onto their loyalty anyway. I hope they’re wrong.
Sadder still is that we men take all this in our usual walking, talking coma. I ask again, what happened to manhood?
The only semblance of subtlety they have is the idea that it’s really just a joke. Like the juvenile bullies caught reducing some kid’s life to misery, and then pleading with the teachers, the parents and the police: “we were only joking!”
The more I go along, the more I realise how much hides behind jokes…
