Free the Nipple

I am reading a book right now called Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions, and Transformations. Basically it’s a book full of different articles about different ways that our bodies become political battlegrounds. Either intentionally or not. It has articles about body hair, about drag, about trans bodies, about menstrual blood as art, about rejecting weight loss, and mastectomies, about autism, and ASL, and Black girls resistance, and ageism. It’s a beautiful book, and a heartbreaking book. It makes me sad, it makes me mad, and it makes me have hope.

But I want to write about an article that feels relevant to the way that social media is censoring women’s bodies at the moment. Something that feels some what unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but is also indicative of a society that seems hellbent on enforcing ideas of morality onto women’s bodies in a way that can only be seen as a mechanism of control and silencing. This article is titled Freeing the Nipple: Encoding the Heterosexual Male Gaze into Law by J. Shoshanna Ehrlich.

I think I have always been very ‘free the nipple’ but I hadn’t considered the legal side of it. And I am a massive reproductive and sexuality law nerd so this was a fun way of thinking about a familiar topic.

First let’s start with the laws, basically we’re talking about indecent exposure laws which make it illegal for women, but not men, to show their nipples in public. And this includes social media. The number of fucking beautiful photos I have had the scribble over in order to make them okay to post is tragic (okay okay I may be being dramatic). These laws are generally justified as being about protecting public morality (read men can’t see women’s nipples without sexualizing them). So women decided that that was stupid. That women should be the ones to decide when their nipples are seen, by who, and how. Seems pretty logical to me.

Except that legally it is continually argued that the laws can be justified by the biological difference between men and women (never mind the transphobia imbedded in this). And that it’s not a big deal that these laws exist. However “different breast exposure laws are saturated with cultural meanings that inscribe a male-defined conception of erotism on women’s bodies.” (Ehrlich, 2019). A set of meanings that is not then also inscribed on men’s nipples. But Penelope, women’s breasts are more erotic. Are they? Are men’s chests and men shirtless not also considered sexy? Do men’s nipples not also give men pleasure when stimulated? If anything, shouldn’t it be the opposite law since at the very least, women’s nipples and breasts also function in the very not sexual way of feeding babies? But this isn’t about biological differences, this is about public reactions and a cultural script. Law makers are just hiding behind a false idea of biology. But really this is about a scrip that is specific to this culture and time period. One that says that the public reactions of heterosexual men and their eroticized vision of women’s bodies is the most important thing to take into account here, not the unequal nature of the law.

So when are women allowed to show their nipples? Well strip clubs would be one answer. Porn would be another. The bedroom is another. So the law makes the exception, that women are allowed to be topless in a highly sexualized spaces that have been (and generally continue to be) a space for men to indulge in fantasies and a space where they want to be aroused. It encodes into the law that what “might be arouse men can only be displayed when men want to be aroused” (Boso, 2009, 147). It gives men power over how women are to be viewed and in what spaced they are allowed to show parts of their body.

This sucks. But also seems like a relatively low priority thing to argue over these days. And I agree it is. But I still care about it because of this idea called Objectification Theory. Basically this is a theory that says that the body is socially and culturally constructed. Specifically that sexual objectification happens when women’s sexual functions and body are separated from her as a person (a hopefully familiar idea). In this way, women are treated as bodies first, “bodies that exist for the pleasure and use of others.” (Fredrickson and Roberts 1997, 194). And the tragic piece to this is that it leads girls and women to self objectify themselves. We start to do anything we can to fit a beauty standard, to make our body fit what we think is best for the use of others, often quite subconsciously. We are more likely to start seeing normal body function as shameful, like menstruation and breastfeeding. We are also more likely to have more body shame, anxiety, diminished awareness of bodily states, sexual disfunction, and disorder eating.

And all of a sudden a law that basically puts the sexual objectification of women into law seems actually like a pretty fucking important thing to be talking about. So fuck Zuckerberg for shadow banning me for celebrating women’s bodies while allowing playboy to post all sorts of things. It’s not ai messing up, its a strategic and intentional statement about who owns the power over how we see women’s bodies.

Sources:

Boso, Luke. 2009. “A (Trans)Gender-Inclusive Equal Protection Analysis of Public Female Toplessness.” Law & Sexuality 18: 143—62.

Ehrlich, Shoshanna J., 2019 “Freeing the Nipple: Encoding the Heterosexual Male Gaze into Law” in Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions, and Transformations. 189–199.

Fredrickson, Barbara L., and Roberts, Tomi-Ann. 1997 “Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women’s Lived Experience and Mental Health Risks.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 21: 173—206.