Daughters of The Sun: What My Feminist Father Taught Me

My father was a traditional Nigerian man of a particular generation. He was a devout Catholic and a military veteran. He came from a large traditional titled family where his own father was a Chief with two wives, which made my father one of fourteen children. In Nigeria, at the time, culture often outweighed religion, even for a devout Catholic family. My grandfather was also a chef and had been a musician in his youth - creative pursuits that sit at odds with the stern, hyper-masculine patriarch the family structure might suggest. To the layman, that might scream 'misogynist origin story', but as the eldest son and third-oldest child, he was placed in a caretaking role from a very young age. My grandmother ran a maternity hospital, so he was no stranger to the mechanics of a woman's body: its power, and its pain threshold. It was a rich and complex life.

He was respectful of women and a fierce advocate for their education. I never reached the heights of doctor, lawyer, or accountant - the "Big Three" of any African parent's aspirations - but I got my degree, even if it meant travelling to the other side of the world for over a year to learn Japanese. He had an opinion about everything but rarely highlighted a practical pathway to achievement. So, when I chose Japanese for one of my GCSEs, he matter-of-factly told me that I was wasting my time and should be studying Chinese instead. Never mind that Chinese wasn't even an option. He did not research local Chinese schools or classes for me to enrol in. Nigerian logic should be studied, but that's an article for another day.

Something I remember vividly, simply because of its absence within my household, is that my father never commented on a woman's appearance. I have no idea which celebrity my father found attractive, because he never let it be known. I know who he admired, and it was always for their talent and achievements: Moira Stewart, Princess Anne, Zoe Wanamaker, KD Lang, Sade - the list goes on. And even if admiration for their work was disguising an attraction underneath, he never once let me know that he held a woman's physical attributes above her intellect.

I always questioned his choice of newspaper - The Daily Mail, which he bought for the crossword(!!) - but I think I would have been ashamed, even from a very young age, had he bought The Sun instead. You see, my friends' fathers, and mothers, read The Sun back when Page Three models were still being discussed for all the wrong reasons. I still can't believe that Page Three was being printed right up until 2015. For 44 years, a barely post-pubescent topless girl appeared daily alongside some inane biography nobody would read. I even remember once helping a friend's father with his Sun crossword, which I found considerably easier than the Mail's.

Both of my parents worked full time, and while the division of domestic labour wasn't always fairly split, the division of parental input certainly was. I realise now as an adult and a parent myself, that my father was actually a feminist. Well, as much of a feminist as a conservative Nigerian man could be in the mid-90s. Being such, he couldn't in good faith allow his only daughter to ever place her self-worth in her appearance. He preached cleanliness, manners and dressing smart, and as a teenager, many a disagreement was had over it. If he'd had his way, I'd have worn a skirt suit and brogues every day of my teens. He never actively warned me of the lustful gazes of men and I wonder if that was intentional. Perhaps he did not want me to ever expect that behaviour from men and see it as normal. The world taught me anyway. Being catcalled when walking home in my school uniform always chilled me to the bone.

For the daughters of men who read The Sun, who openly discussed their lust over Linda Lusardi, Sam Fox and a very young Jordan, as she was known then, I wonder how that shaped their view of how women fit into this world. Their protector and provider was ogling the breasts of girls barely older than them. It confused me as a child, seeing those papers on their kitchen tables and I still wonder how those daughters processed it.

However, it wasn't only the fathers. Plenty of their mothers read The Sun too, but they never suggested it be left off the kitchen table. So, I wonder what that taught their children about a woman's role - that she could tolerate, even participate in, her own diminishment as entertainment, as long as it came wrapped in a crossword and a horoscope. Maybe some genuinely didn't see the harm as they'd grown up with misogyny themselves, and normalisation is hard to see from inside it. Maybe others saw it clearly and made a calculation that keeping peace at the table mattered more than a fight worth having, however noble that fight may have been. Either way, a daughter watching her mother read that paper learns something too. Not from her father's gaze this time, but from her mother's silence. She learns that a woman's discomfort with how women are treated is negotiable. It can be folded up into a newspaper and left by the toaster. That might be the more insidious lesson of the two, because it doesn't look like misogyny. It looks like keeping the peace.

The fathers taught their daughters what men were allowed to want. The mothers taught them what women were expected to put up with.

I believe my confidence, my self-worth and a good part of the reason I've succeeded as a solo parent comes from a certainty that I can do this without a partner. I have not actively pursued dating because my children are still young. My father raised me to believe I could achieve whatever I set my mind to. He never told me to get married and have babies. He encouraged me to get educated and earn my own money. That in turn gave me enormous freedom: I could marry whomever I wanted, as long as they were a good human being. I never needed to assess a partner's earning potential. They simply needed to be a good person because I would have my own economic power, independent of a man.

That said, he placed huge value on finding a good partner. Not as a financial safety net, but as emotional infrastructure. A strong family unit, he believed, lets you conquer the world together. No matter how bad your day at work, a good partner is there to lift you up. As long as your home life is solid, you can weather any storm. So to him, marriage mattered deeply but it was not a rescue plan.

That is what he and my mother taught me, and I'm grateful for it. Had I been raised to centre men, my life would have crumbled the moment I became a solo parent.

I wonder, too, whether some of this collective damage is still working its way through society. The rise in pornography consumption, the mainstreaming of Only Fans and the ease with which young people now describe their own bodies in transactional terms has not happened in a vacuum. It has been preceded by decades of kitchen-table normalisation, of women's bodies as light entertainment between the sports pages and the horoscope.

Tellingly, The Sun's own agony aunt, Deidre Sanders, later gave evidence to a parliamentary inquiry warning that children were accessing explicit pornography online at younger and younger ages. What's easy to miss is that Sanders wrote her column for The Sun from 1980 to 2020. That’s a tenure that overlaps entirely with Page Three's run, which didn't end until 2015. So, for 35 years, she was the trusted, empathetic voice offering readers relationship and wellbeing advice, in the very same paper printing topless teenagers a few pages over. I'd genuinely like to know whether that sat easily with her, or whether it was simply the water everyone was swimming in.

It would be reductive to place all the blame on The Sun as the media and the public have always had a symbiotic relationship. The Sun ran Page Three for 44 years because it sold. Every mother who left it on the table and every father who bought it for the easy crossword (and stayed for the rest), was also informing the paper on what to print tomorrow. The demand and the supply fed each other.

And more recently, The Sun has covered the push for stronger online age-verification laws to keep children away from pornographic content. Which raises an obvious question: where was the age verification on the newspaper itself? No ID check stopped a ten-year-old picking it up off the kitchen table, or a parent leaving it open on the sofa. The industry spent four decades treating a child's easy access to a nearly-naked woman in print as a non-issue, then, once the image moved online, discovered it had opinions about age restrictions on nudity.

I don't think that's hypocrisy in the cynical sense but I think it's compartmentalisation. It is the same kind that let those mothers leave the paper on the table without comment. It's so much easier to see the harm once it's someone else's problem, in someone else's format and happening to someone else’s child on a screen you don't own.

Before you come at me, I know that Page Three and internet porn aren't the same thing. Neither are a lit match and a wildfire but one very much led to the other.

Given the right conditions, scorched earth doesn't stay barren. It will grow back different - slower and more deliberately than before.

So we have a collective task ahead. Raise girls in a household where women are praised for their achievements, not their appearance. Raise sons who admire a woman for what she's built rather than how she looks doing it. Be parents who don't risk leaving such a newspaper lying around because there's no more demand for it.

Daughters of The Sun