Can you tell the difference between men and women’s nipples?
We’ve all probably heard about Free the Nipple movement or seen some of its various hashtags on social media. This advocacy group fights for equal rights for men and women. They believe the law should treat all of us equally, and so they empower women to express themselves and denounce injustice. One issue they focus on is censorship of the female body. They signal how preposterous and unfair it is for men to be able to take their shirts off in public or post photographs on social media without suffering any consequences, while women who show their nipples are fined and in some places arrested for doing the exact same thing in public, or their photographs are taken down in most websites.
The group recently accomplished a major victory. They sued the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, to end its topless ban, a law that punishes women who show their breasts in public with up to 180 days in prison. The city appealed the lawsuit, but a federal judge decided the lawsuit would stand as the topless ban could be unconstitutional. There’s still some way to go, as the issue will be settled in court, but for the time being, women can walk the street of Fort Collins shirtless and braless without fear of being put behind bars.
This is just one example of Free the Nipple’s evolution. Nowadays they’re a very well known advocacy group, with a strong presence on the internet, and they even released a film about their origins in fighting against hypocritical and unfair censorship laws. Their supporters include celebrities such as Miley Cyrus and Cara Delevingne, and smaller groups that take a step forward in promoting equal rights for men and women by using social media as a tool to express their ideas on equal rights for women, just as Free the Nipple continues to do to this day.
Genderless Nipples is one these groups. The idea behind this Instagram account is simple: people send them extreme close up pictures of their shaved nipples and they post them on their profile. The result is an enormous collection of nip pics of all shapes and sizes, some pierced, some tattooed, some unadorned. By asking the volunteers to shave the surrounding area and take their pictures from a close distance while they’re erect, they ensure Instagram won’t be able to recognize whether the nipples are male or female; if they belonged to a woman, they’d immediately be taken down.
Scrolling through Genderless Nipples’s profile, it’s easy to understand what their message is. No matter how long you spend trying to figure out the nipple owner’s sex, like Instagram, it’s impossible to determine whether they belong to a woman or a man. With a very simple concept, Genderless Nipple shows us just how ridiculous our sexualization of the female nipples is. We socially differentiate body parts that, when looked at closely, are identical, no matter if they belong to a woman or a man.
The desexualization of the female nipple is something that could happen in the near future. Advocacy groups such as those mentioned in these article are gaining ground by cleverly asking us to reconsider how certain behaviors we don’t think much about are constructed on the unfair precept that men are superior to women. This has to change.
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Check out why we censor female nipples and don’t censor mutilated bodies.
Images by @genderless_nipples
