Abstract
The US Supreme Court will decide later this year whether women have the same right as men to go topless in public.
Gary is not just censored by Facebook. She can’t leave her house topless either. In sweltering Las Vegas, where Gary lives, public exposure of female nipples, unless for breastfeeding, is a criminal offence. “If I go out into the garden I have to have a top on, but my husband does not,” she said.
Gary is from France and grew up seeing her mother and grandmother’s nipples. She’s frustrated, but also positive. GoTopless.com have declared 2017 the year of equal topless rights.
As well as a series of protests and parades in the USA at the end of August to mark Women’s Equality Day and celebrate 10 years of the organisation, they are eagerly anticipating a case at the US Supreme Court later this year, Tagami vs the City of Chicago.
The case centres on a woman, Sonoko Tagami, who is suing the city after being fined for exposing her nipples. The hope is that these combined efforts will pave the way for equal treatment between men and women.
“In the last 10 years things have really changed in the US. Our contribution has really helped. I’m noticing a lot of activists standing up and standing their ground,” said Gary.
GoTopless is one of many organisations and individuals seeking justice for the female nipple. Most famous of all is the Free the Nipple campaign, which, like GoTopless, encourages women to put their nipples on display. Then there’s the Genderless Nipples account on Instagram, with 78,600 followers, which invites viewers to guess whether the nipples they feature belong to a man or a woman, and encourages people to send in pictures of their own nipples. There’s even an online tool, the Internet Acceptable Male Nipple Template, a cut-out of a male nipple that women can paste over their own.
Index contacted Facebook and Instagram for a comment, but received no response except being forwarded Facebook’s company policy. This says Facebook allows images for medical and health purposes, as well as breastfeeding, the latter a recent policy change following a lot of pressure. Photographs of art that depicts nude figures are also acceptable. The everyday female nipple is banned, as according to Facebook, “some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content – particularly because of their cultural background or age.”
While Facebook have made their rules explicit, the law itself can be vaguer. Sadly, this isn’t to the benefit of women. Rowan Pelling, former editor of The Erotic Review and current editor of The Amorish magazine, which covers love and lust, said there is no legal precedent in the UK for women to cover up. Rather, laws on what constitutes public indecency are nebulous, leaving them open to interpretation. The result is often self-censorship, said Pelling, both on the part of content creators and content sellers, as people err on the side of caution. The UK high street newsagent WH Smith, for example, has strict guidelines on what can go on display, she claimed.
“You will not see a single person who is going to be on those shelves who will not comply. You have to comply out of commercial interests,” she said.
Photographer Sarah Cresswell, who snaps high fashion in leading magazines, told Index how models’ nipples are fastidiously covered. Flatter nipples are covered by tape and more prominent nipples photoshopped out.
“Would I ever expose [female] nipples for a photo for a magazine? No, I would not,” said Cresswell.
Poking fun at the rules earlier this year, Archer magazine covered a nipple on its front cover with a removable sticker reading “uncensor me”. The editor told The Guardian this was also done to avoid having an adverse impact on sales in Australia, the USA, UK and Germany.
Bronzino, an allegory with Venus and Cupid (from around 1545)
CREDIT: The National Gallery, London
For Pelling, part of the drive behind censoring the nipple is because “the body makes people nervous”. “We have a funny relationship because we are nervous about it, but we love it too… Prurience is our big crime [in the UK].”
There are, of course, other reasons. Negative attitudes towards women’s bodies which come from the monotheist religions shoulder part of the blame. In areas where Christianity, Judaism or Islam are powerful influences in society, nipples are often villainised. In some contexts it’s a hangover from class systems, such as in India where the sight of mothers breastfeeding in public is more common in rural, poorer areas, and where until the 19th century certain states only allowed elite women to wear tops.
But there are some less likely culprits. “Much of this comes from a feminist viewpoint. We are still fighting over the terrain of our bodies,” said Pelling. It’s true. In an age where women have been told their breasts are sexual and proscribed where arousal can take place, women are deeply divided over whether liberation comes in the form of a top on, or a top off.
Artist and academic Micol Hebron created the acceptable nipple template in 2014 after Instagram censored an image of herself appearing topless at a breast cancer fundraiser art exhibition
CREDIT: Micol Hebron
Such tensions are evident in art history. Over at The National Gallery in London, nipples are definitely on display. Index counted a total of 281 nipples in the main, free galleries on the day we went. Of these 89 belonged to women, 111 to men and 81 to children. Christ owned most of the male ones. Some of the female nipples were partly concealed in the mouth of a child, others were being suggestively tweaked.
“Those images are there and there are a variety of them as well,” said Dr Rosalind McKever, a curator at the National Gallery.
“There are images like the Bronzino Venus, which is self-consciously titillating, and then you do have things like the breastfeeding Madonnas and pictures of Charity, which have a different function,” she added.
It’s clear from the galleries that different centuries have very different attitudes. In the most basic sense, the pendulum swings between female nipples being hidden or associated with the satanic, and times when they are celebrated.
It would be easy to read into this that certain periods were more relaxed about nipples than others, but such an assumption would be an oversimplification. McKever explains that the women on display were not everyday women. Moreover, with the exception of religious images, most of the paintings were the property of the very wealthy, and at times risque paintings were covered in cloth.
“There was an awareness of the exciting nature of these images,” McKever said.
Still, there are moments when art did in fact imitate life. Images of Queen Mary II of England from 17th century Britain often show her baring her breasts. According to research by Angela McShane Jones from the University of Warwick, it was commonplace for women to display their breasts publicly then. Low-cut tops that revealed part, if not all, of women’s breasts were in vogue, as was nipple make-up (coral, a preferred colour).
And in other cultures around the world, such as Aboriginal communities, women go topless to this day. It’s not without controversy and there are examples of fines, arrests and lawsuits resulting from this for Aboriginal women at least, showing nipple censorship doesn’t just punish women, it punishes cultures. Perhaps these risks are lessening though, as civic actions multiply and in so doing challenge the current status quo, one nipple at a time.