An online "redtop" called The Tab was launched this year and received 80,000 hits in its first week. But a section where students pose in their underwear has caused controversy and led to calls for the scantilly clad students to be covered up.
The Cambridge student union women's officer, Natalie Szarek, said that they should be removed because they “reproduce and reinforce harmful attitudes towards women”.
Miss Szarek complained that “semi-naked women in provocative positions are being shoved in freshers' faces”, adding: “We can do better as a university”.
Meanwhile one of the student models, who posed on a punt in a small pink bikini and high heels, requested her photos removed from the site.
Becky Adams was said to have been “embarrassed” by the fall out of appearing in the tabloid and said she had only done it “as a favour for a friend”.
Until yesterday a picture of her accompanied an article headlined “Bra-vo” – a piece about a study which found that Cambridge women have on average the ninth largest bra sizes in the UK.
She was replaced by a picture of a large blue bra, without a woman attached.
Taymoor Atighetchi, 21, a third-year student at Trinity College and one of the tabloid’s three co-founders who paid £500 each to launch the website, defended The Tab and said it would continue its style of journalism.
"There's a huge amount of intellectual snobbery around, mainly from those who haven't read the site," he said.
"We do not think what we are doing is sexist. It was always the intention to have a debate about these issues. The website is a tongue-in-cheek version of the tabloid newspaper - we are not just emulating it."
Editorials in the tabloid have hit back at Miss Szarek, and highlighted her arrest at a recent protest. The Tab called the student union a "sad dinosaur" that needs to "die or be cut back".
Meanwhile, the website has maintained its redtop coverage with another recent feature about “size 12 stunner” Emmalina Thompsell, a student at Gonville and Caius College, who has reached the final of Miss East Anglia competition.
The latest “Tab Totty” to takle part in a photoshoot was a girl called Heidi, who wrote a comment piece to go with pictures of herself in gym wear.
“I’d like to see myself as someone with brainpower and boobs, a pairing which I feel Cambridge culture strives to deny,” she said.
The female photographer who took the “Totty” photos also defended the website and said that six senior women staff are all proud to work for The Tab”.
“As a female who works on the Tab editorial team and a feminist, I’m delighted that so much debate has been generated over the Tab Totty section," she said. "The main aim of The Tab was always to stimulate debate, and I feel we have truly succeeded when it comes to the issue of Page Three modelling."
She added that none of the student models had been exploited.
"Surely the fact that they are educated and bright women, and still chose to partake in Tab Totty proves that ‘page three’ and ‘glamour girls’ are not just women who have no other choice but to turn to modelling.”
The website has also come into conflict with Cambridge’s traditional old student newspapers, Varsity and The Cambridge Student.
Although its hits have fallen to 50,000 last week, The Tab says it is the most read student publication in Cambridge.
Mr Atighetchi said that the papers have lost readers and hundreds of copies are left untouched at every college.
"Students want news quickly and they want it to be entertaining – they get enough essays already," he said.
The Varsity co-editor, Anna Trench, a third-year English student, disagreed, claiming the traditional press is "taken a lot more seriously" and that the anti-elitist Tab was run by "three of the richest students in Cambridge".
