FREE THE NIPPLE. FOR ALL.
by Emma Shapiro
Read this in the FEMINIST ZINE
Often disregarded as frivolous or an excuse for gratuitous nudity, Free The Nipple is an essential movement at the center of the fight for bodily autonomy and artistic freedom online.
Begun in 2012 and quickly made viral by the famous and the not-so, Free The Nipple has jumped borders, evaded bans, and won court cases; it has made waves but not nearly the tsunami of change it deserves.
Faced with societal resistance, and bolstered by rigid policies online, the female-presenting body has been relegated to sex object, belonging not to itself but instead to the gaze of society. So-called Community Guidelines have for decades maintained that the nude body belongs to either sexual activity or art made long ago by men. The consideration of the “female nipple” as sexual in nature relegates its exposure to indecency, regardless of the fact that all bodies have nipples. Logic dictates that by censoring “female nipples,” female-presenting bodies are twice as likely to be censored or punished as male-presenting bodies simply because of sexist bias, hindering health care, advocacy, profit, and creative expression, particularly for marginalized, disabled, and BIPOC bodies. This is hardly a mistake, but, rather, as time passes, clearly an opinion enforced on us all.
It is not only common to disregard the Free The Nipple campaign as superficial, but as well to consider online censorship to be less real, less important. These two hurdles have allowed for continued and further repression of women and marginalized communities, and diminishment of the movement. A campaign born on social media, viral and powerful, #freethenipple remains a hidden hashtag on Instagram and a taboo subject in our society, despite its provable impact and status as a movement. Online restrictions have real implications: recent studies of topless sunbathing in Europe, a popular feminist tradition since the 1960s, have shown its steep decline. Sunbathers surveyed report feeling uncomfortable not because of body shaming or health risks, but because of increased sexualization of their breasts and the possibility of an image making it to social media. Our censorship online has real impacts on our choices, liberties, and daily lives.
One of the clearest and most ominous examples of how these biases effect our lives is the continual censorship of art and artists online. Rising moralism in politics and online targets artists alongside sex workers, performers, and activists in an attempt to further stigmatize and punish bodily autonomy. According to the High Tech Law Institute’s Eric Goldman, “We are seeing a resurgence of government censorship across the globe and in the United States--and that poses extreme danger to artists, who are often top targets for government censorship.” This worrisome shift has already resulted in harassment, threats, arrest, de-platforming, and loss of income for artists worldwide. Images removed off their own websites, the inability to send email newsletters, removal from selling platforms, and withholding of support from artistic institutions are only some of the recent experiences of artists who are using the body in their artwork — bearing in mind that female-presenting bodies are twice as likely to be sexualized and censored as male-presenting bodies due simply to the “female nipple”.
As long as the “female nipple” offends, the female-presenting body will exist in a perpetual state of potential obscenity. The Free The Nipple movement represents not only the desire for freedom, but the necessity of equality for all bodies. All those who believe in bodily autonomy should march with us under the banner of “Free The Nipple,” because far more is on the line than just nipples.