How Breasts Are Destroying Innocent American Families

If you think mass shootings or voter repression are problems, then you aren’t paying attention…

It’s happened again. I find myself freshly devastated. This cycle of horror in America never ends.

No, I’m not talking about another shooting. (That’s fine, all good, totally normal.) I’m talking about yet another family-centered space being defiled by the presence of female breasts.

As I said: the horror is overwhelming.

If you haven’t heard (though surely you must have because news this horrific deserves national attention), two female University of Utah students recently showed up to a football game wearing body paint meant to look like tank tops. That’s right, body paint.

These two brazen sluts walked right through the gates, according to witnesses, and not a single person stopped them. Not the person who took their tickets. Not a passing police officer. Not the hired security.

At some point, thank Jesus, a female officer asked the girls to put on shirts and they complied.

That doesn’t, however, erase the fact that these two hussies destroyed a family-friendly university football game with their paint-covered tits, leaving the children who witnessed this debauchery forever scarred.

But please don’t worry. The university is considering disciplinary action. And I know that’s not nearly enough for such an egregious offense, so again, let me comfort you with the news that these two women will likely face criminal charges, as well. “Lewdness” demonstrated in front of minors is a Class A misdemeanor in the state of Utah, which comes with a jail sentence of up to one year, and fines up to $2,500.

And if all goes well, the interpretation of Utah’s criminal code will force those two perverts to have to register as sex offenders.

Thank god we have the law on our side in this disgusting offense against civility, morality, family, and God, Himself.

Do you know what Americans find to be the one thing preventing us from achieving civilized society? Unregulated access to AR-15s? Nope. Voting restrictions that prevent every citizen from participating in democracy? Nope.

The female body.

You can tell because we work harder to ban the female nipple than we do to ban assault weapons.

Have you ever really asked yourself why female breasts are lumped in with genitalia when it comes to laws about public indecency or rating requirements for movies and TV shows?

I don’t mean to be repetitive (I’ve written about this before), but the male and female chests are biologically identical except for the fact that women’s mammary glands have been activated by hormones which then instructed the body to grow fat cells around them as a form of protection — which is what we know as breasts.

Regardless of gender, we all have nipples. We all have mammary glands. We all have breast tissue (fat on the chest). We can all get breast cancer. (Yes, really.)

So why did we arbitrarily decide that women’s chests are indecent, but men’s chests are not?

How did anyone ever get away with comparing breasts to a penis or vulva, in terms of determining what we should and should not reveal in public? Two are genitalia, which means they clearly fall into the same category. One is a chest. What idiots banded together to agree on this illogical correlation that refuses to take basic biological facts into consideration?

No, really, without the benefit of this false equivalency, I want you to explain to me why men can go to sports games without a shirt on, wearing body paint (or not), without it being considered lewd, offensive, or sexual.

But for women, it’s a criminal offense…

Have you ever seen a woman in public wearing nothing on top except for body paint? Or perhaps a very skimpy white bikini top? Or even a skin-tight white tank top?

If you have, I can only offer my sympathy. That must have been incredibly traumatic. Something that left lifelong scars, especially if you were an innocent child.

At least, that’s what you would think when you see the response to these two college women who had the audacity to show up to a game wearing paint on their allegedly indecent breasts. YouTube personality Melea Johnson, a self-professed Christian mom vlogger, happened to be there with her family and decided to make a federal case (kinda literally) over this.

She posted about it on Instagram* from the game, detailing exactly what happened and lamenting, “Is this literally what our world is coming to?!” Later, she posted a follow-up to explain her stance, reminding everyone that she wasn’t angry that the women were topless — she was angry that they broke Utah’s criminal code regarding “lewdness involving a child.”

Honestly, I fail to see the distinction, being as the women’s state of undress is what the law refers to, so obviously, Johnson was, indeed, upset that they were topless.

I’d also like to ask Johnson and her many followers who agreed with her why it’s okay to see a breast in public if the woman in question is breastfeeding. Does the presence of a baby magically turn her breast from “indecent” to “virtuous?” Am I the only who finds that kinda…I don’t know…arbitrary?

I feel like it should be noted that Utah women were some of the last in the nation to be granted the right to breastfeed in public. The state was the 49th (that’s right, second to last) to update their public lewdness laws in order to protect breastfeeding mothers in 2018, and only after fighting for years against male lawmakers who felt “uncomfortable” with the idea of normalizing (and god forbid, legalizing) such “immodest” behavior. So maybe it’s not surprising that seeing two pairs of painted breasts at a Utah football game would have thrown everyone into such a titty. I mean, tizzy.

So let me get this straight: our biology makes us grow fat cells around our activated mammary glands in order to protect the food that allows baby humans to survive, thus ensuring the proliferation of the species…and this is considered indecent? Immodest? Inappropriate? Lewd?

It’s appropriate for a child to witness the uncovered breasts of a woman who has a baby in her lap but seeing two women’s breasts covered in pasties and body paint enjoying a university football game (just like the male spectators who similarly chose to show their team spirit with body paint on their bare chests) is a deliberate act of lewdness against minors?

They weren’t flashing anyone any more than the topless male spectators were. They weren’t masturbating. They weren’t fondling one another or letting others fondle them. They weren’t having sex in public. They were just there, cheering on their team. (Not to be repetitive, but…just like the male spectators who attended sans shirts.)

So that’s that? We’ve solved the issue? Immoral. Indecent. Perverted. Textbook example of sex offenders, right?

Right?

Did you know that there is no federal law that protects a woman’s right to breastfeed in public? That was left up to the states to decide, and it took some of them (Utah and Idaho) until 2018 to finally get on board.

And now, with the reversal of Roe v. Wade, we find ourselves lacking in even broader federal protections when it comes to our reproductive health.

Men — well, mostly white men — can travel anywhere in this country and always be assured that their liberty will never be threatened. They are protected by state and federal laws.

Women, on the other hand, have never had that luxury. And now, rights we previously had are being stripped. We are Americans, we belong to this nation, we pay taxes to the federal government, and yet…we do not have the same federal protections that male Americans have.

And why? Because our culture has hyper-sexualized the female body to the point where even the act of breastfeeding is considered to be vaguely taboo. God knows, nothing scares Americans more than sex.

It’s interesting that Johnson didn’t share a single post on her Instagram account to address the horrifying school shooting in Uvalde. Around that time, she posted a video of herself shaving her 12-year-old daughter’s legs for the first time. Odd that no one questions the way we usher young women into the grooming habits that demonstrate sexual maturation according to America’s heteronormative standards. And odder still that she posted not one, but two rants about these topless women and the damage that they did to all the “innocent families” in attendance.

Truly, I’m staggered that she had nothing to say about America’s latest school shooting and the deaths of 19 children that actually did destroy innocent families. Instead, we’re going to start an outraged conversation about what our nation has come to because of four pasties and some body paint? Really?

In all fairness, those two college students don’t appear to have broken the law at all, so far as I can see. Their nipples were covered by pasties, and their areolas (if they were visible outside the pasties) were covered by opaque red paint. They met all the standards outlined in the public lewdness criminal code, so what’s the problem here?

Why are we so outraged, horrified, triggered, and repelled by the female body? Why have we, as a society, accepted the mass murder of our children via gun violence as the acceptable collateral damage of protecting the right of angry men to bear arms, but the sight of a pair of breasts — even covered with pasties and paint — is considered an act of violence and perversion that destroys families along with the moral foundation of our country?

Alongside our normalization of acts of mass violence committed by men, we are simultaneously sexualizing and criminalizing the female body to the point where the government is increasingly stepping in to monitor it. To monitor us, the ones who exist within these bodies.

It’s 2022 and the sight of a female nipple is considered more of a danger to the well-being of this nation than an angry man walking into a public building with an automatic rifle. If that doesn’t alarm you, then I don’t know what will.

*Author’s note: In support of the two young women who might face criminal charges for something that should not be criminalized, I have chosen not to link to Melea Johnson’s Instagram account and further perpetuate what I consider to be dangerous propaganda.

© Yael Wolfe 2022

Yael Wolfe is a writer, photographer, and creator of Howl. You can find more of her work at yaelwolfe.com.