A blurry image of the Duchess of Cambridge's breasts has been published in a French magazine. William and Kate are reportedly furious. No wonder. It is a malicious betrayal of her privacy. It is humiliating. So often the publication of breasts as popular entertainment is there to say: "Look! She's only a woman. That's all." This is true even when the woman in question is enthusiastically compliant. The Sun, for example, repeats that message ad infinitum.

I feel the same way as Lucy-Anne Holmes, the actor and author who has launched a renewed campaign against the Sun's Page 3 girls. Leafing through the newspaper, Holmes was enjoying reports about the achievements of female athletes, and pleased to note that there was no Page 3 girl. Then she hit page 13 and saw "a massive picture of a girl in her pants". She couldn't shake off thoughts about the image, and how insulting she found it. Spurred on by the fact that the issue of Page 3 had already been brought to the attention of the Leveson inquiry by the feminist groups Object and Turn Your Back on Page 3, she decided this was a good time to hit the internet and start mobilising public opinion. Which is probably a better bet than hoping the Leveson inquiry will address the matter, because as John Whittingdale, chairman of the Commons culture select committee, pointed out this week, Leveson was set up to investigate the way in which the press procures stories. The Sun procures Page 3 girls by straightforward means, and applicants are never in short supply.

I hardly ever look at the Sun these days, but when I do I am always struck by the petty vulgarity of these portraits, and by the banality of the fact that every issue of the paper, for four decades, has broken anew the exciting story that women have breasts. I remember, as a teenager, studying the breasts of the women who appeared in the tabloids, and fretting about the dismal fact – to me, then – that mine weren't "like that". I was delighted when Clare Short tried to get rid of Page 3 in the mid-80s. I remember walking past her house in London, when she renewed her efforts in 2004, and seeing a gaggle of bottle-blond young women, wearing tiny white shorts and T-shirts with the Sun's logo, giggling as they made some sort of photo-opportunity protest against her.

And there we have it. I feel the same way as Holmes. But a lot of women don't. A lot of women feel the people who want an end to Page 3 are uptight harridans, envious, bitter, prudish and prescriptive. They would love to be glamour models themselves, given half a chance. They want it for their daughters. You can see them in any city on a Friday night, hobbled by their Lycra dresses and towering heels, so keen to be viewed as "empowered" that they can barely walk.

They are on Team Katie Price, those women, not Team Lucy-Anne Holmes. They will argue that, far from being exploited, women such as Price are doing the exploiting. Plenty of Page 3 girls, former and current, would agree. The significant fact, often brushed under the carpet, is that they are not wrong.

One of the difficult things about exploitation is that it is a pyramid, each layer becoming more abject. Some feminist discourse has an annoying simplicity to it that invites us to look at society as having just two main layers – men on top and women underneath. It is true that the top of the pyramid is overwhelmingly male-dominated, and the bottom is overwhelmingly female-dominated. But it is wrong to say that only men exploit and demean, and only women are exploited and demeaned.

It is often argued that Page 3 exploits and demeans the women who feature in it. But it exploits and demeans the men who consume it, in turn. It is pathetic, this casually expressed inability to wade through a couple of pages of the most simply presented of news coverage without addressing a need to stare at a photograph of a very young woman's breasts. (The Sun stopped using 16-year-old models when the Sexual Offences Act, 2003, made it illegal.) The feminist argument that Page 3 objectifies women is well-rehearsed. But maybe it would be helpful to focus a bit more on why it is that some men so stubbornly seek such regular and constant assurance that the important news about women is mammary glands.

Context is important. The Sun is packed with news about successful men – sportsmen, politicians, businessmen, war heroes. For some of the far less successful men – reading these exploits – it must be a comfort to be reminded so graphically that while they themselves are not movers and shakers, they are at least not women, not just a couple of mounds of flesh on a body. Their gender is something they have in common with the men of whom they read. Women's only contribution, in Sun world, is to look pretty and prompt a penis-twitch.

Surely Page 3 caters only for men who don't have relaxed, healthy, mature relationships with women. I don't mean just sexual relationships, though that is a given. Can men who need a fix of tit each day really have healthy relationships with their mothers, sisters, daughters, let alone female colleagues or any possible female friends? Page 3 tells these men, very clearly, that their misogyny is OK, something they don't have to question or change in themselves, just part of being a man.

Page 3 tells them that staring at knockers is not wrong, or inappropriate, or dysfunctional. It tells them it is a bit of fun, perfectly suitable for a family newspaper, nothing to be ashamed of. It also, no doubt, tells a good proportion of them that it is the women in the real world, who won't show them their baps, who are the withholding, fucked-up bitches.

Page 3 is the highly visible tip of misogyny's iceberg, and it is the unlucky women who are in the lives of such men who bear the brunt of their frustration. That is something that women who "empower themselves" with their glamour modelling need to think about. No doubt a lot of the women who take part in Page 3 are just young and naive. But I'm sure that many of them are misandrists, dependent on male attention, craving it, but unable to see that it is not men who are useless, just the sort of men that they attract.

And that is the saddest thing. Page 3 encourages men to be contemptuous of women. It also encourages women to be contemptuous of men. Miserably, it can make women contemptuous of each other too, sometimes even of themselves. Likewise, it is hard to see who is winning among the men – those who have contempt for the many of their gender who don't think that crude images of breasts are just a bit of fun, or the ones who have contempt for those who do.

Page 3 doesn't just objectify and exploit women. It objectifies and exploits people. Worse, it carries the message that objectification and exploitation are all that human beings can offer to each other, or expect. After it has had such an influence for so many decades, ending Page 3 could be seen as a pyrrhic victory. But the important thing is to understand why that particular editorial gimmick was – and remains – so very pernicious and nasty.