Shikha Dalmia on the schizophrenic demands of the “Free the Nipple” movement:
The Free the Nipple movement (which has already become the subject of a 90-minute, yawn-inducing documentary) tries to cure such attitudes, but in such a ham-handed and shock-jocky way that few real women outside of college campuses can relate to it, other than publicity-hungry celebrities. Thanks to the movement, 100 students—men and women—at UC San Diego took off their shirts last month to fight for the equal right of both sexes to go topless. Likewise, Scout Willis, the daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, earned her two minutes of fame some years ago when she went strolling topless in Manhattan to protest Instagram’s nudity policies barring pictures of topless women. Not to be outdone, Miley Cyrus, who has never encountered a publicity stunt involving her body parts that is too over-the-top, tweeted a picture of her bare breasts with red stars on the nipples to express her solidarity.
These women should be able to milk their boobs for whatever purpose they want, free from state censorship and violence, to be sure. But does that mean that freeing the nipple is the “civil rights issue” of our time — as some feminists claim — that requires busting all social taboos against female toplessness?
Not really.
For starters, it’s not like this kind of thing hasn’t been tried before. The “burn the bra” movement was all the rage among feminists in the 1960s. But it didn’t go beyond a few symbolic bonfires because going braless is simply too physically uncomfortable for most women with modern lifestyles.
Free the Nipple activists accuse society of a double standard for allowing men to show their breasts but not women. “Why are we more offended and outraged by female nipples than male nipples?” one demands to know.
But the fact is that their movement itself is based on a double standard. Indeed, if they were interested in genuine sexual equality, they wouldn’t just fight for the right to go topless, but all laws against indecent exposure. So why don’t they? Maybe because they realize that allowing strange men to swing their schlongs in streets would be neither comfortable nor safe for women.
