GOTCHA, said The Sun, as Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth, smiled broadly and tilted her nipples perkily upwards at all those no-fun, nannyish feminists who'd thought they might have won the ear of Rupert Murdoch, David Dinsmore et al.

The high heid yins at The Sun allowed its sister paper, The Times, to run a report saying Page Three would no longer feature in the tabloid. It then, two days later, printed a topless model under Corrections and Clarifications. "We would like to apologise on behalf of the print and broadcast journalists who have spent the last two days talking and writing about us."

What a wheeze. For two days male columnists shook their Magic 8 balls and came up with the traditional grumps about freedom of speech - some even managing to shoehorn in Charlie Hedbdo references - and mirthless feminists getting their undies in a bunch over a harmless British institution, men saddened by the lack of easy access nipple and crying censorship.

We already knew The Sun likes boobs. It has liked boobs avidly for the past 40-odd years, within reason, of course. It didn't like the Duchess of Cambridge's topless photos, and it ran a high-profile campaign against internet porn. Objectification of women is good, except when it's not.

This stunt, this week, was not, however, about boobs. It was about refusing to be told what to do. In an ideal world you would want Page 3 to be rejected, rather than banned by the efforts of campaigners. Banning always leads to the charge of mirthless prudishness, creating resentment.

This week was a power play against all the women who have been campaigning to see the back of it, allowing them to think, for just a short time, that their opinions had been considered and found valid.

In the 1990s when Clare Short campaigned against Page 3, the paper mocked her as "fat and jealous".

Twenty years on and Dylan Sharpe, the paper's PR man, revelled in the Page 3 flare-up, tweeting a picture of said Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth, to a selection of high-profile names who had dared to criticise the page.

That's really the raison d'etre of Page Three - telling everyone their place and keeping them in it.

It was the now-defunct News in Briefs box on the Page Three picture that grated most. A little one-line snippet of pseudo-intellectualism designed to mock the model, designed to highlight the improbability of a woman having both plump mammary tissue and brains.

And its real trick was to never make that explicit, so that the conclusion was at the inference of the reader: if you think this means the paper is saying women cannot have looks and intellect, well, that's your own thought.

To those who don't understand the objections to Page Three, it seems like a little thing because it is so easy to dismiss - there's so much porn available online, there are nipples on TV, it's only light-hearted, you're just jealous, why aren't you focusing on something more important, women have the right to choose to pose topless - without putting it in to a broader context. That is, a society with low rape convictions, domestic violence and rife with casual objectification.

There are those, also, who argue that Page 3 is a celebration of female sexuality, which is plainly rot. If the models felt sufficiently celebrated they wouldn't need to be paid.

In the two-day gap between nipples, there were charges that The Sun hates women. I don't think The Sun hates women at all. I don't think The Sun holds women in high enough regard as autonomous and self-regarding human beings to hate them. They are commodities, that is all. And that is worse.

Page 3 is a tired, outdated feature, serving no purpose other than to neatly illustrate contempt for women.

There is nothing stopping The Sun from ending Page 3 other than male pride. But cutting it was the powerful thing to do, bringing it back nothing more than limp decision making.