Angela Lambert: Who cares about those topless Page Three girls?

The world has changed. Now women's magazines flaunt a spread showing 100 different penises

Towards the end of the Sixties – about the time Rebekah Wade was born – The Sun went topless, soon after it had been bought by Rupert Murdoch and he had transformed the paper from the relaunched but ailing News Chronicle into the soaraway Sun.

The Sun was, and still is, like a Hogarthian barmaid: bawdy, jolly, buxom and noisily opinionated. Above all, it has the Cor! (or, as it's written nowadays, Whoar!) factor on every other page. In a word, tits. What was different about the new Sun was that these tits were in full view, unshielded by coy hands or folded arms, by bras or bikinis, by strategically placed scarves or beach towels.

For the first time a newspaper gave you the lot, on Page Three, every day. A dozen nipples a week was standard. And despite the indignant moral minority huffing and puffing that naked breasts were an outrage in a family newspaper – children might see them! At breakfast! – circulation soared. Soon The Sun was challenging the mighty Mirror as the new editor, Larry Lamb, whipped the puritans into a circulation-boosting frenzy.

Now, almost 25 years later, the response to the news that the present editor, the ageing Duncan Campbell lookalike David Yelland, is on the way out and red-haired, whippet-thin Rebekah Wade will take his place seems to show that the same old puritans are still out there, still frenzied. The instant response to the news was: she's a woman – so will she drop Page Three? Wade has never pretended to be a feminist. When she edited the Sunday tabloid the News of the World, it had no feminist columnists, it didn't boost successful women MPs or attack laddish culture, and it splashed on big boobs and love-rat stories. The paper knew its readers' favourite topics – sex, sport, slimming and, above all, soaps – and gave them stories from that fantasy world. Wade herself dated and is now married to the actor Ross Kemp, who made his name in EastEnders.

Why should anyone imagine that she would come over all prissy on succeeding to the editor's chair at the equally vulgar Sun? If anything, she'll take it even further downmarket with her favourite brand of saucy postcard/pub humour. Good jokes and big tits sell down-market newspapers, and selling newspapers is her job – not promoting feminism or making the breakfast table fit for innocent eyes.

Besides, the world has changed in a generation. Now, ordinary women's magazines flaunt a double-page spread showing 100 different penises or a feature challenging readers to pick out the couples among six naked men and six nude women. The 9pm watershed on television no longer protects the young and – in London at least – every public phone box is covered with graphic stickers showing exactly what sexual services are on offer. Much as we might regret it, the innocence of children is a thing of the past. Getting Page Three girls to put their clothes back on won't alter that.

The times, too, were more innocent back then. In its early days, the main Page Three photographer was a charming, straightforward young man called Beverley Goodway. He used to say "I must have the best job in Britain!", but in fact he seemed remarkably unmoved by the parade of what The Sun called "lovelies" posing topless in his studio. And he was scathing about the husbands and mothers who submitted photographs of their wives or their daughters, hoping to get them on to Page Three.

If the media pundits are going to get exercised about The Sun, there are far more important things to concern them than a pair of well-rounded young breasts. Such as: will the new editor continue the gung-ho policy that produced the Falklands headline "Gotcha!" when the Belgrano was sunk? Will it mindlessly cheer "our brave boys" as they set off to protect the oil interests of President Bush's cronies? Will it ask the right questions? Will it be even-handed in its coverage of the fire-fighters' dispute, let alone asylum-seekers at the end of their tether; or will it bellow easy, unthinking abuse? These are the important issues – not whether Page Three will survive.

Both real life and the media have moved on, leaving Page Three behind. Erotic images are all around us, all the time, often draped across 15ft posters. Film advertising is increasingly explicit, films themselves even more so. It can't be too long before a television commercial shows simulated intercourse, followed by a reviving cup of instant coffee or a nice chocolate biscuit. People's behaviour in the evenings and at weekends has become a scandal, with men pissing openly in the street and couples fondling uninhibitedly on public transport or copulating in doorways.

If there is an issue it is surely that of public decorum (what a sweet old-fashioned word!) and the right to privacy, not the willing exposure of a big smile above a pair of breasts.