Women’s place

I hold no particular brief for pictures of topless models and certainly none for drunken louts or half-baked adolescents singing vulgar songs on buses, but Dani Garavelli’s article (Perspective, 14 November) requires some comment nonetheless.

First, her notion that the Sun’s Page 3 pictures convey some “message about the place of women in society” is absurd.

Surely she can credit men, most of us at least, with sufficient intelligence to understand that the fact that some women pose for topless photographs says no more about the female population as a whole than the fact that some women are thieves, drug peddlers or child abusers.

Next, I wonder if Miss Garavelli has ever taken an evening walk through the streets of Edinburgh or any other Scottish city for that matter.

The groups of girls, some ­patently under age, who wander around in heavy make-up and provocative dress, displaying manners and language of which any self-respecting person would be ashamed, might make an interesting subject for one of her columns.

I condemn the behaviour of the University of Stirling students she has chosen as her targets as much as she does; but I deny Miss Garavelli the right to mount any “feminist” pedestal when it is ­patently obvious that women are as capable as men of behaviour which demeans and degrades the status of sex and inter-sex relationships.

In our present-day society this entire aspect of human behaviour is in a state of appalling confusion.

I have no idea how this can be resolved, but I have little faith in the simplistic approach of presenting women as helpless victims and men as aggressive brutes.

Derrick McClure

Rosehill Terrace

Aberdeen