Free the nipple: Time to make going topless as unremarkable for women as it is for men
MAYBE future generations will remember 2014 as the year of the boob. Sorry. The breast. Even as we march around wearing our ‘No More Page Three’ t-shirts, with just under 30,000 of us tweeting The Sun to urge its editor to put them away for good — resulting in The Sun’s 22 million free copies being Page Three-free — social media had leapfrogged forward again. Ahead of this straightforward old-school feminism of no longer wishing to see female breasts used as sexualised wallpaper in mainstream newspapers, young women are now focused on something rather more radical — Free The Nipple. That is, closing the perception gap between the male and female breast.
This initiative, spearheaded by high-profile young women such as Scout Willis and Miley Cyrus, follows a film of the same name by an American equality campaigner called Lina Esco. What it suggests is equality at its simplest; that the female nipple needs to be perceived the same way we perceive the male nipple — that is, non-sexually. In a neutral, non-emotive and desexualised manner. That is, without causing the internet to melt every time one makes its way onto social media. Willis, daughter of Bruce and Demi Moore, has taken to being photographed unclothed from the waist up to emphasise the point — and has been duly derided.
