Budrevich: ‘Free the Nipple’ campaign brings attention to the disparity in censorship
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” This quote, credited to Mahatma Gandhi, makes an appearance in the movie “Free the Nipple,” which is based on the true story of a woman in New York who was wrongly arrested for public indecency. The movie, with its budget of less than a million dollars — chump change compared to big block buster movies like “The Avengers,” which had a budget of 220 million dollars — served not to turn a large profit, but to spark a grassroots revolution and bring nationwide attention to the double standards of censorship in America.
“Free the Nipple” has done just that — since its release in December of last year, it has sparked marches all across the United States: in New York City and over sixty other cities in honor of “Go Topless Day.”
So why has this movement gained such nationwide success, you might ask. Why do women care about going topless all of a sudden? In short, the Free the Nipple movement is about equality. More than that, it’s also about stopping the over-sexualization of the female form, especially in acts that are not only non-sexual, but are also natural, beautiful and critical for human life, i.e. breastfeeding. It’s about bringing attention to the censorship that takes place in our media, in the supposed “Land of the Free.” Freeing the nipple is merely the Trojan horse to garner attention for the real problems at hand. Feminism is taking back the notion that “sex sells” and instead of using it to objectify women, it’s using the concept to shine a light on important, valid topics.
As President Eisenhower once said, “the most dangerous weapons of any tyrant, are not weapons and guns, but censorship.” Reporters Without Borders, a group devoted to bringing uncensored news from around the world, has ranked the United States 49th on the Censorship Index out of the 180 countries in the world. Ironically, a lot of the things censored from the American media include the female nipple, while things like videos of beheadings in Saudi Arabia are seemingly omnipresent on both social media and news outlets. Instagram is notorious for taking down pictures of women showing period blood stains, while allowing pictures of the same amount of blood to stay posted so long as the blood wasn’t somehow deemed “sexual.” Facebook has been making a few strides in the right direction, allowing mothers to display pictures of themselves breastfeeding without the image being taken down.
Many countries that rank higher than us on this list, especially in Europe, already have the trend of allowing women to go topless when men can go topless. Additionally, there are tribal groups in Africa that allow both women and men to be topless at all times. There, the female nipple is a normal, natural and necessary part of life, not something to be feared, hidden, covered or grotesquely sexualized.
The Free the Nipple campaign calls attention to this disparity in what is censored and what is considered “appropriate for public viewing” on both social media and news channels and strives to create a dialogue with the public about censorship. According to the American Psychiatric Association, the average child witnesses 200,000 acts of violence and 16,000 simulated murders on TV before they turn 18. These acts of violence go uncensored on social media, while women’s nipples have to be covered up — while the nearly identical male nipple is also free to roam the internet uncensored. Men take post-workout photos of them topless in public restrooms, but if a woman were to do that, she would be sexually and verbally harassed on social media and then her picture would be taken down for violating policy. This hypocrisy has led to a trend for women to Photoshop nipples of men over their own nipples in photos that would otherwise be taken down for “nudity.” The glaring double standard these images display are so blatantly grotesque that it would be laughable if it weren’t so ridiculously misogynistic.
The real kicker for me about the Free the Nipple campaign comes from the fact that the majority of states in the U.S. ordain that it is technically legal for women to be topless in the same settings that it is legal for males to be topless such as at the beach or walking around city streets. However, this is not the social norm for most states and women continue to get wrongly arrested for being topless, even in states where it is fully legal such as New York and Ohio. In both of these states, the wrongly-arrested women have sued the city and won large settlements for their harassment. There are 35 states where it is effectively illegal for women to be topless, including both states where waist-up nudity is completely illegal in all circumstances, even breastfeeding, and states where it may be legal to be topless, but the statutes contain loopholes which allow for discrimination or disregarding the law entirely.
What many people don’t realize is that it was also illegal for men to be topless in public until 1936. Women are only trying to close that gap and gain a little ground on the continual struggle to end sexism and discrimination by achieving equality.
We need to free the nipple to help end unnecessary censorship in the media, desexualize the female nipple and bring us one step closer to terminating sexism and triumph in equality.
Jordan Budrevich is a second-year majoring in bioengineering.
