Is Rebekah a page three girl or not?

What would Sigmund Freud have made of Rebekah from Wapping? I don't mean the woman of (apparently) that name who featured on page three of The Sun last week, but the paper's new editor. It isn't clear whether Rebekah Wade thought of the joke on her own, but she has missed a trick here, so to speak. In order to make it really funny, she should have posed topless herself, thus pulling off the stunning double of becoming the first woman to edit The Sun and the first editor to appear half-naked in his or her own paper.

That singular honour has yet to be claimed, by Wade or anyone else, although the day cannot be far off. (Editors in the nude. The naked editorial conference. I'm thinking Vanity Fair cover. Or maybe not.) Anyway, to go back to Freud, he was clear that looking plays an important part in sex, but he also recognised the dangers inherent in scopophilia – not a word that features frequently, I suspect, in editorial discussions at Wapping. Freud argued in Three Essays on Sexuality that scopophilia, or voyeurism to use a more familiar term, can easily become a perversion.

And we all know what Wade thinks about perverts, whom she relentlessly harried in her previous incarnation as editor of the News of the World. This suggests she should now be naming and shaming herself for confirming that her new paper will continue to offer its daily dose of voyeurism – except on Saturdays, of course, when it will be replaced by an exegesis of the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein. It may even be that the "Rebekah from Wapping" stunt was an unconscious admission of complicity – perhaps even a cry for help – from a woman trapped in a culture of morbid sexual obsession.

The decision has a lot to do with the success of the Daily Star, which might easily pick up disaffected Sun readers if Wade dropped the page three pin-up. It has become an institution and the days are long gone when Clare Short, then a Labour back-bencher, campaigned vociferously for its abolition. But I do not for a moment, you will be absolutely astonished to learn, buy the argument that it is a bit of harmless fun.

Dated, yes, and as corny as those old seaside postcards that showed a wimpy man and a shapely young woman eating ice-cream cones ("Ooh, you've got a big one, Derek"). It also has antecedents in the nudist magazines of the Fifties and Sixties which, in a more innocent age, offered mildly titillating photographs of naked women under the guise of encouraging, ahem, a healthier, outdoor lifestyle. These days, with all sorts of graphic sexual images available on the internet, page three seems mild stuff.

The women all look much the same – blond, thin, young, naked except for a thong – and I am intrigued by the fact that readers are periodically invited to vote for their favourites, on the daring assumption that they can actually tell them apart. (I suppose it would be embarrassing for The Sun if it turned out that readers preferred Jordan to its flame-haired new editor.) They are also relentlessly coy, so that an alien trying to work out from these pictures how humans have sex might erroneously conclude that breasts are women's sole sexual organs. I know this practice had its origins in laws regulating public sexual displays, but Freud would certainly have views on it, probably involving the words "castration complex".

Another phrase that comes to mind is vagina dentata, especially as the women who appear on page three are routinely shaved and buffed in that area to the sexual blandness of a Barbie doll. But breasts are safe to look at, especially when their owner – I am tempted to say "wearer" – does not ask anything in return. (OK, she got paid, but the transaction is very definitely off-camera.) No wonder so many women continue to report difficulties in having orgasms, or that there has been such a surge in the popularity of cosmetic surgery. How would men feel if they were faced with photographs of well-hung young blokes in their newspapers day after day?

The fact that a woman is now in charge of page three, and one with Rebekah Wade's track record of inciting moral outrage, somehow makes the whole thing even worse. Over here, Professor Freud, I have a case that might interest you ...