What is it about women’s nipples that causes such controversy? As soon as UK temperatures exceed 20 degrees, you are guaranteed to find topless men in council estates, on construction sites and down your local pub. Yet the fact remains, if a woman were to go topless at work, she’d find herself in a meeting with HR, or if out in public, being pulled up on public indecency charges.
The #FreetheNipple campaign aimed to desexualise women’s bodies, but now, over a decade on, questions have been raised about its success and whether it should be considered performative activism.
The campaign was started in 2012 by filmmaker Lina Esco, who created a documentary that featured her running through the streets of New York topless to protest against gender inequality and the censorship of female bodies.
Not only did it seek to expose the differences in perceptions of male and female bodies, but it aimed to criticise the overt sexualisation of the female body that remains in society today.
#FreeTheNipple was extremely successful in utilising social media to encourage female bodily empowerment around the world. Yet despite its cultural impact, it’s fair to say that the movement has effected limited change from a legal standpoint, and censorship of the female body remains an issue across social media platforms.
In a world that largely caters to the male gaze, is it possible to #FreeTheNipple without contributing to the sexualisation of the female body? The function of female nipples has never been sexual; it is societal ideology that positions them as such, but how can we expect perspectives to change when the imagery produced within mass media maintains that women’s bodies are for sale?
Women’s bodies are used regularly to advertise and sell products, and it is the entertainment industry's single-minded focus on aesthetics that causes them to be vilified.
We’re over 20 years on from Janet Jackson’s nip slip, yet for some, that still overshadows her success.
Furthermore, LGBTQ+ and feminist groups alike have condemned the movement for its lack of inclusivity, as it has traditionally centred white, heterosexual, slim, able-bodied women at the forefront, suggesting that inequalities remain amongst women when it comes to what bodies are perceived as acceptable to be on display.
The official merchandise does little to dispel this ideology, depicting a small pair of breasts that cannot be larger than a B cup. Yet what happens when a woman with larger breasts decides to free the nipple? If attitudes towards breastfeeding are anything to go by, society usually tells her to put them away.
The #FreetheNipple movement therefore gets to the core of what divides us as humans - physical differences and preferential treatment- making it as essential now as it was when it first originated, because clearly there is still a long way to go before these double standards are put to bed.
Written by Leah Marie Cox
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