Okay, so I posted about this before on the occasion of Scout Willis’s topless foray through the Lower East Side, and hesitate to do so again because I am not sure I have much new to say. Nevertheless, since the issue has since come up several times in media, and I have become aware of a nation-wide “Free the Nipple” campaign to advance public toplessness as a form of female empowerment, I post again out of ongoing bewilderment.
My argument being, in effect, that the whole thing is ultimately too silly and harmless to deserve serious attention, I decided at that time that it didn’t make sense for me to even be drawing attention to it on this public forum. Yet, it continues to appear in my trusty Facebook newsfeed, which has recently offered this celebration of #FreeTheNipple, a skeptical write-up at The Guardian, and (since when you click on a shared link, Facebook automatically generates three more on related topics) even this proposed biological explanation for the sexualization of the female breast, unique to the human species.
More to the point, however, I learned that IJFAB blogger Joy Schaefer supports the movement and welcomes the opportunity to disabuse me of my skepticism. Hence this post, only lightly edited from what I composed in January, and followed immediately by her response.
The occasion for my original write-up was a piece from New York Magazine listing “Because Toplessness Is a Right (and a Movement) in New York” as reason number fifteen to live here. It includes a picture of eleven women in pink ski masks with beasts bared standing in pyramid formation on the stairs of an institutional-looking building with giant colonnades. My initial assumption was that a man wrote this article: awesome to live in NYC because you have the occasional opportunity to ogle topless young women. As it turns out, however, I was wrong: it was written by Allison P. Davis, the same author of the piece referenced in my previous post about Willis. I could not turn up much about Davis except that she is on Twitter @AllisonPDavis, where she describes herself as a “writer @the cut [with a] focus on culture, sex, psychology and pizza.” In any case, she is a woman living in NYC, and she thinks the legalization of toplessness is great.
And so, to continue, I’ve learned that there is even an “International Go-Topless Day,” with an annual march in Manhattan. Although I was aware of it this year, I did not attend. I would have felt like an idiot marching topless in solidarity (though men were welcome) and like a voyeur if I just went to observe–even though I would have been welcome in either capacity. In fact, the activists would doubtlessly have been happy for me to show up with a super-telephoto lens, snapping away to post images on this blog and drawing awareness to their cause, however critical my accompanying commentary. But I would simply have been too uncomfortable with the duplicity of attending in merely apparent support of a cause I ultimately regard as silly, when my actual interest was triggered by the very attitude or pyscho-sexual phenomenon they were marching (altogether futilely, in my view) to overcome.
The product is basically made of the buy cheap cialis same constituent known as tadalafil. Due to the increasing inflation often people forbid to buy brand version pills. find out for info buying cialis in uk With cialis generika the production of too much of white blood cells, and swelling. Once it is active the erection will take place only when you are sexually stimulated. cute-n-tiny.com viagra in india pill will give you better satisfaction and online service is really helpful. This, I believe approaches the heart of my bewilderment. Although I did not attend the march, I did look at the (minimal) media coverage, and the New York Post’s photos and commentary confirmed my suspicion: participants were overwhelmingly young women with mostly conventionally attractive bodies. So too with those in the more recent New York Magazine photo from the Free the Nipple documentary. (I do give this venue credit for posting the photos uncensored as the participants would have wished. Other celebratory coverage blurring out the naked breasts performatively undermines the message it purports to endorse.) A few activists have a little more belly fat than the editors of Cosmopolitan would be likely to countenance, but, overwhelmingly, the women demonstrating for this cause do not look to be the sort of women frustrated by a lack of sexual attention. The Post article linked to earlier in this paragraph takes its title in part from a 34-year-old man among the observers: “Go-Topless Day ‘the best Sunday ever’.” I’m pretty sure he wasn’t saying this on the basis of his deep-seated feminist convictions.
And that is the problem: if the object of this movement is to desexualize the female breast, I just do not see how it could possibly hope to accomplish this. If women want to “flaunt what they got”–in spite of my doubts about how often this is a genuine act of self-empowerment–I am certainly not going to put up a fuss about it. But I cannot grasp how these actions could be seriously defended as advancing a meaningful feminist agenda.
Or perhaps I am mistaken in identifying the mission of these activists as desexualizing the female breast. If the issue is the right to display oneself proudly as a sexual being, that casts the matter in an entirely different light. It’s great for all people to love their bodies and take pride in their desirability. If, for some people, this takes the form of marching or just wandering around NYC with breasts bared, I suppose I don’t have any problems with that. But this is not the rhetorical frame in which I see the cause typically presented. (Full disclosure: I did not invest my time and money into watching the documentary for the cause. Anyone with more accurate information, please speak up in the comments to correct any misrepresentations in this post.)
Nevertheless, if I had stronger feelings about this, I would push the agenda in the opposite direction. Let’s march, but to require that gentlemen please cover up. Lots of us would just prefer not to see so much of so many topless guys. Make an exception for parks and beaches, if you like. I’d support that: these are designated places of recreation and leisure. But on your way to work or the grocery store? No thanks. Please put on a shirt. It can be a close-fitting tank top, muscle-T, whatever, but at least make an effort. Maybe, though, I’m just a prude.
All of this said, I wish to close by noting that there is a serious and closely related social justice issue pertaining to the naked female breast: public breastfeeding. This would, incidentally, have to appear pretty high on any list of ways to begin to desexualize the female breast in American culture. More to the point, however, it is a public health issue: there are many, well-documented benefits to breastfeeding, and breast-pumps, I have been told, are decidedly uncomfortable and in many cases simply impracticable. Take, for instance, the ridiculous controversy surrounding a photo of Karlesha Thurman feeding her infant at her graduation ceremony, nipple obscured in baby’s mouth. How is this not a socially acceptable practice? Loving moms doing their best to nurture their babies–who’s against this how again?
