Modern Brit Models and the no foof rule

[Norman Stanley Fletcher]

I saw this post in the Margaret Nolan thread:

Originally Posted by beutelwolf

There were certain censorship constraints at the time that had to be adhered to, and full frontal nudity was not tolerated. If, for example, you studied female anatomy on the basis of images published in Girl illustrated in the 1960s you would come to believe that women had neither pubic hair nor a vagina.

And it tied in with something that's been much on my mind for a number of years now- that makes me think have things really changed- and that's the contemporary British model who will happily display her breasts and sometimes even her bum but on no account will ever show her down below, her unmentionable, her secret area... her fanny, in other words.

There's a number of very high profile models who have made very successful careers out of going topless (and godbless them for it, the world is a better place because they have) and they'll appear in the lad's mags, sometimes even Pl*yb*y, certain websites (the teasing variety), some even have their own sites but they will not on any account show off their foofs.

Now, this almost certainly puts me in a bad light, but I'd love to see them in the all together... I don't want gyny shots, I'd just like to see the full display, as it were... does this make me a bad person?

The point of this thread is I understand that it's the model's choice but this approach has almost become a standard business model for the girls, there's the topless on one side and there's hardcore on the other and there seems to be no inbetween... I like some of the arty European sites that do full nudes of very beautiful models but why doesn't there seem to be a British variant? I can think of one Brit photographer who does do this sort of shoot on his sites, but he and the models he uses are the exception rather than the rule. Elsewhere, it's either all very coy or all very crass.

Or am I missing something? I'm not saying all models must show off their fannies, I'm not an idiot, I appreciate any model whose willing to stand in front of a camera in whatever stage of undress (even fully dressed) so I can gawp at her at home in the privacy of my attic. I respect that. I just wondered what your views were?

[Greenman]

Thing is nowadays there is a tendency to shave off hair which seems to be the in-thing to do for all models but back in the late 70s & early 80s models couldn't be seen here(especially page 3 girls) completely naked due to the Draconian laws we had - top shelf was okay but rare for them to appear in, more as a teaser pic on the covers to entice you to buy the magazine. Little did we know of course that many page 3 girls including favourites like Samantha Fox and Kathy Lloyd has got them off for foreign magazines - I'd have killed to see Samantha Fox completely naked but that didn't happen until the P-Boy issues she appeared in. We were content with Page 3 of the Sun and Star but then some appeared in M-Fair and P-House and Fiesta, Escort and Men's World, but by then the magazines were changing and going with more US girls and newspapers were under pressure from the feminists to change too.

I will admit to a frisson of excitement when I first went on the Net, finding new pictures of page 3 girls not seen completely naked before and some of the newer ones looked amazing but by that time in the late 90s the so-called 'underbeard' was becoming more 'airstrip' thanks to the Brazilians, it caught on or now the girls are completely bald-something which doesn't appeal to me at all. Would George Clooney or Brad Pitt be sexy to women if they were bald? Who knows, but to me the golden age was the 1980s when I was able to nick, err buy my first mag with a naked page 3 girl featured-heaven sent for a callow youth. Ah, they were the days!

[Historian]

Yes, I see what Norman's getting at- and I'm sure, like him I'm not alone in thinking that there have been a whole lot of Page 3 girls over the years I'd have loved to see showing it all- and I'm not talking about full-on spread legs, open-pussy shots either.

I wonder whether the grip that P3 has traditionally had on the 'glamour modelling' business in the UK has something to do with this, combined with a dose of good old British puritanism where anything sexual is concerned? Certainly the legal issues Greenman mentioned would have been significant for P3, and non-top-shelf mags, where full nudity was, and remains a no-no.

Looking through the VEF threads for some of the very well-known Page 3 girls of the 80's, although some of them did bare all for Mayfair etc on occasions, there were a lot who didn't do any more than topless, even for the 'top shelf' mags.
It's notable that even recently, Kelly Brook kept her knickers on for that much-hyped Playboy shoot a year or so back (although she then went on to show everything in a shoot for an obscure art/fashion magazine shortly afterwards- Go figure...)

Equally interesting, and something I've seen mentioned on VEF a few times now, is that in some cases, as Greenman has just said, some of the girls we only ever saw topless in the UK, did go fully-nude for publication overseas.
I've been a huge Linda Lusardi fan since my teens, and it was only in the internet age, and particularly when I found VEF, that I made the happy discovery that Linda had bared her bush for the camera rather more often than I'd ever realised- I'd always assumed that all she'd done were the well-known Mayfair and Fiesta shoots right at the start of her career.

One current girl who's particularly caught my eye recently (and who seems to be getting quite a bit of attention in Zoo/Nuts/Front etc) is Lucy Collett, aka Lucy V/Lucy Vixen, who won the Sun's Page 3 Idol 2011 contest - It didn't take long for a full-frontal set of Lucy to turn up...
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...74&postcount=4
...and someone did speculate in the P3 Idol thread (though I don't think the post is still up) whether the Sun might drop her if it turned out that many more full nude sets were out there.
I hope that won't be the case, but I do wonder whether now that she's doing P3, that set of pics will turn out to be the last time we see Lucy, as Norman puts it, showing off her foof

[magnut]

As an American with (at the time) limited, er, exposure to UK mags, I made an observation in the 1980s that the extent of what was displayed in mags appeared to depend on whether HM Government was Conservative or Labour.

Is this true, or was I just imagining it?

[Historian]

A thought that just occurred to me- thinking back to my teens, there were no generally no sources of UK models going any further than topless apart from the top-shelf mags (Mayfair, MO, Fiesta, Club etc).
Conversely, there were just as many, if not more pics of topless girls published than there are now. The tabloid papers, particularly the Sun used to make much more use of their P3 girls in features and articles, as well as on P3, and although we didn't have the 'lads' mags' like Nuts, Zoo etc, there were a whole range of other magazines which regularly featured topless models- particularly car and motorcycle mags. One of my teenage favourites was Custom Car magazine, which always featured a topless model posing with a featured car on the front cover and centrespread- complete with bare nipples on the mag cover!


As a teenage car nut, I had quite a stash of these in my teens, although looking back, I'm amazed my local newsagent happily sold them to a 14-year-old!
I mention it here because I had a vague nagging memory of having seen the very occasional pic in CC in which a model was clearly showing her pubes- and sure enough, while looking back through VEF, I' ve found this post by Chris Chunt of a series of pics of Helle Kjaer flashing the lot in a series of pics from a 1981 CC article. I'm pretty sure I remember having this mag at the time...

http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...&postcount=190
OK, they're clearly small pics in the sidebar of a page, but how the hell did they get away with it? In fact, did they get away with it?
Not least because I don't think it was the only time it happened- I've got a very vague memory of at least one CC centrespread where if you gave the model more than a second glance, she was clearly showing rather more than the pic first suggested...

[Norman Stanley Fletcher]

I suspect we may be of a similar vintage, I had quite a stash of mags as a teenager, my mum and dad run a newspaper business and I used to spend a lot of time sat out back after school inspecting the stock and sometimes liberating it

For me that was porn, I don't think we ever had anything like Whitehouse in, it was the Paul Raymond titles we stocked- and I was a big fan of those. That similar middle ground of porn seems very unfashionable now.

When I got the internet (10-12 years ago?) I was amazed at how much porn there was to be found, mostly like Greenman revisiting the Page 3 and pin-up girls of my youth... then I got into the modern stuff and hardcore but it lost it's appeal really fast, it's so formulaic and mechanical and I prefer softcore stuff, solo girl stuff, what I call the middle ground.

As I've said it's always struck me how apparently reserved many Brit models are, I think there's a career path many girls can take which is quite set in it's ways, it is about Page 3/Nuts style glamour and it's about meeting a footballer/celebrity or getting onto TV, becoming respectable, if you like.

I'm not knocking girls that do that either, good luck to them, some aspire more I'm sure, but I think there's a trick being missed here. I'd like to see a British M*t *rt of similar, great looking models, stylish photography, more 'fannying about'.

I do find the way some models pose to avoid showing off their muffs, all twisted about and bent forward very unflattering sometimes.

Anyway, cheers for joining in, I appreciate it.

[Greenman]

Just as a side note many Page 3 girls had to or decided to sign an agreement to allow distribution abroad of their pictures but NOT in this country-unless the aforementioned magazines picked them up and someone like Samantha Fox insisted on it-you could see her point, but once when she was signing posters at a West End record store there was chaos-has she been one to show all there would have been pandemonium and more than a large plate glass window broken. Personally I craved for pics of her, Gillian de Terville, Maria Whittaker and others fully but it was only when going online did I discover they already had done-Maria however I did get in a M-Fair back in 1993 when I got back from Australia, from a WHSmith kiosk in Victoria railway station-now that takes ya back don't it?

[Mad Koala Bear]

Originally Posted by magnut

As an American with (at the time) limited, er, exposure to UK mags, I made an observation in the 1980s that the extent of what was displayed in mags appeared to depend on whether HM Government was Conservative or Labour.

Is this true, or was I just imagining it?

To my recollection they were both as puritanical as each other. Besides, we only had Conservative governments during the 80s.

[Norman Stanley Fletcher]

Sometime on from my initial post I'm now of the opinion British models who don't go completely nude are hiding something down there, this is more my paranoid fantasy than anything concrete and I suspect this is down to having ready and frequent access to porn from elsewhere in the world. I may chance upon a Euro model who goes topless on first appearance but a couple of photo sets down the line and she'll be showing everything off. But when I see a new (to me) Brit model on here, I can go through pages and pages of posts and she'll keep her fanny hidden at all times often in a very elaborate or ungainly fashion.

And call it whatever you like but one bit of my brain will argue that it is the model's right to share as much or as little of her body as she likes and quite right too but there's also this part of my brain that asks 'why does this always seem to be British models that do this?' and 'what is it about British society that finds the notion of a young woman showing herself fully nude apparently so shameful?'

Part of my brain wonders if it's just the Brits are above all this, we don't need to see fannies on show because we're normal, well-adjusted, getting plenty but then I look at our politicians, our celebrities, get on public transport or go out in town of an evening and realise that can't be it at all

Perhaps it's because we're all perverts, filled with rage, self-loathing and not getting any that Brit models operate a tits and bums only policy. In which case, fair enough.

Or maybe it's just me. I've become used to seeing nude beautiful women from other countries so that when I see Brit models splendid as they are I'm struck by their reticence, their apparent coyness and the sense that I'll never see them 'as nature intended'.

Am I asking too much? Yes, I probably am. I'm not entitled to see nude women whenever I want, but at the moment thanks to the internet I can.

[Sir Honkers]

Originally Posted by Norman Stanley Fletcher

I'll never see them 'as nature intended'.

What, you mean hairy armpits and shagpile carpet?