Page 3 was harmless. Here’s why I’ll miss it

‘I for one would be sorry to see them go,’ wrote George Orwell. ‘They are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue.’

He was writing about the seaside postcards of Donald McGill in 1941, but his defence of them and their ‘enthusiastic indecency’ could equally well apply to Page 3. Orwell’s argument was that McGill’s caricatures of women, ‘with breasts or buttocks grossly over-emphasised’, gave expression to ‘the Sancho Panza view of life’. There’s a fat little squire in all of us, he thought, although few of us are brave enough to admit it. ‘He is the unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul,’ he wrote. ‘His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with voluptuous figures.’

Orwell believed that the art of Donald McGill served as a release valve in a society that was otherwise virtuous and repressed. For the most part, we choose the soul over the body, but a culture in which all manifestations of our animal instincts was expunged would be unbearable. Just occasionally, when we hear ‘sermons against gambling’ and ‘the solidarity songs … of left-wing political parties’, we want to let out a tremendous raspberry, and in Orwell’s view we should be allowed to do so. That included, in his day, being able to buy postcards that vegetarian feminists would consider ‘vulgar’ and ‘obscene’.

OK, Orwell didn’t use the phrase ‘vegetarian feminists’, but he did point out that one of the stock comic figures in McGill’s postcards was ‘the Suffragette’, who always appeared as a ‘feminist lecturer’ or a ‘temperance fanatic’. There’s a link here between feminism and puritanism that I’ll come back to, but first I want to deal with the main objection to the ‘safety valve’ defence, namely, that pictures of naked women are not harmless.