Women Will Never Be Free Until Our Nipples Are
Why the hyper-sexualization of breasts is dangerous
When I was a little girl, I was obsessed with breasts. I thought they were so beautiful — the pinnacle of womanhood. My sister and I regularly stuffed washcloths into our bathing suits so we could run around the backyard pretending to be She-Ra or Wonder Woman.
I was also sexually obsessed with them. There was something about them that seemed…overwhelmingly hot, for lack of a more precise phrase. Some kids were all about peeking at genitals, but nah. I couldn’t have cared less about other people’s vulvas or penises. Those areas seemed shameful to me, thanks to all the cultural conditioning around that area of the body, but they didn’t seem very sexual to me.
No, it was boobs that were sexual. Not just sexual but…carnal. And even obscene.
Sure, I found myself overwhelmed with romantic fantasies about Spiderman and Lion-O, but when it came to my boundless sexual curiosity and explorations, there was basically only one ticket there: breasts.
I would sneak my mother’s JC Penney catalogs into the bathroom to stare at the lingerie section for hours, just imagining the breasts that were barely concealed by the pretty bras and slips in the photos. My cousin and I constantly stole our grandfather’s Playboy magazines, because we didn’t have to imagine anything with those — the breasts were everywhere.
I remember one night, sleeping over at my cousin’s house, my aunt and uncle let us sleep in their bed because we’d told one too many ghost stories and got scared. After they thought we’d fallen asleep, they turned on the Playboy Channel and watched one of the movies. I watched it through my eyelashes, barely breathing, hoping they wouldn’t notice I was awake, and it was like one sexual lightning bolt after another. The couples in the movie weren’t really having sex — it was more about the seemingly sex-obsessed female characters who were chasing the overwhelmed and frightened men. Every five minutes one of the actresses whipped her top off, letting her D cups fly, begging her male companion to fuck her, and almost every scene ended with the guy running away, terrified.
I kinda felt like I understood it. Seeing tits being flung around like that…you either run in the other direction or dive right in and be destroyed by some primal, elemental sexual energy.
Thirty-some years later, I’m still obsessed with boobs. I love them. I love looking at them. I love looking at mine. I love touching mine. I love fantasizing about lovers doing naughty things to them.
But also, I’m more and more aware that my breasts, and all breasts, are just breasts.
As a young woman, I always went to such great lengths to cover up, even at the doctor’s office. I felt indecent letting anyone but lovers glimpse a peek of them. And, it must be noted, I felt like it was normal to feel that my breasts were indecent.
By the time I was in my late thirties, I really didn’t care that much. They were just boobs. I started walking into the bedroom, naked after a shower, without bothering to close the curtains. This infuriated my boyfriend. “Those are my boobs,” he’d yell. “I don’t need the dude next door looking at my girlfriend’s tits!”
I had no problem telling him my boobs weren’t his, but I had a harder time trying to explain to him that I didn’t care who saw my boobs. What was the big deal? Yet, I knew I was supposed to care. I knew I was supposed to think my breasts were obscene and that they should be hidden.
Once, while watching a TV show in which a woman went on a date with her husband wearing a blouse that was cut down to her belly button, exposing a good portion of her breasts, my boyfriend declared that he would never let me go out like that, where every man could see the most private and lascivious part of my body.
I didn’t really think it was that big a deal and mentioned the #freethenipple campaign that had just started getting traction on social media. “Men get to go in public without a shirt on. Why can’t women show a little side boob?”
“It’s disgusting,” he said. “It’s no different than a man flashing his dick in public. Women like that should be arrested for public indecency.”
As you can imagine, that moment was a major turning point for me, though I didn’t quite know it at the time. Beyond the obvious fact that it illustrated that I was with the wrong person, it made me realize how completely toxic our culture’s view of breasts is.
Whipping my shirt off became pretty easy for me once my relationship ended. When I went in for a wellness visit, I left the top portion of my gown untied and open, my breasts semi-exposed. The doctor, when she arrived, pointed and said, “Your ties came undone.”
I shrugged and carried on with the conversation, boobs still visible.
When I was having issues in that area and shared it with my acupuncturist, who didn’t do a lot of work around the breasts, she asked me, very tentatively, if she could take a look. I had already unintentionally flashed her at least a dozen times by then, so I said, “Of course!” and flung the blanket off my body. She asked if she could touch the area, and again, I said, “Of course.” I felt no sense of shame or immodesty.
When I started posting my self-portraits, most of which involve some degree of nudity, I was surprised that I didn’t feel as much resistance as I expected to posting them. It’s not that it was easy — posting those that showed more of my body, or part of my face, or unblurred images of my nipples was extremely difficult for me, making me feel vulnerable long past the point of discomfort.
And yet, something drove me to keep going.
Immediately, I found my photos being removed from Instagram, and not only that, they suspended my account three times in 2019 — and simply because I had posted a photo of my side boob, in which the nipple was entirely cropped out.
I was shocked by how much this infuriated me. I don’t think the female nipple is any different or more obscene than the male nipple, but hey, I was playing by their sexist rules. So why did they keep suspending my account and threatening to permanently delete it? It took Facebook (the owner of Instagram) more than four years to suspend the account of one of the most dangerous, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic voices in recent American history, yet my nipple almost lost me my account?
I heard my ex’s voice in my head again, talking about his anger that other men might get a peek of my breasts, that women who showed their breasts should be treated as sex offenders… The whole thing seemed suspiciously out of control.
Recently, thanks to yet another reexamination of recent history and the ways in which sexism and misogyny have harmed female public figures, I’ve been seeing accounts of past events recirculate. Most notably has been the “Nipplegate scandal” of the 2004 Superbowl, in which Justin Timberlake ripped off part of Janet Jackson’s bodice at the end of their halftime performance, revealing her breast, the nipple of which was hidden beneath a pastie.
Predictably, theories about why it happened all called out Jackson as the mastermind behind the stunt, and all blame was heaped solely upon her — even by women.
In response to the so-called scandal, FCC Chairman Michael Powell said, “It was as if somebody had come into your church and took their clothes off while you were sitting there on Sunday morning.”
Yep. That sounds reasonable to compare the Superbowl to church, right? And to condemn a woman’s breast as the goddamn unholiest thing that could possibly appear during such a “sacred” event.
All this absurd hype and false sanctity around the female breast is one thing and one thing only: a reflection of rape culture.
It’s men deciding that they have the right to define our bodies as existing only for the purpose of sex. That’s exactly why we have a culture in which there’s still such a debate about breastfeeding in public — because men decided breasts were pornographic, and therefore, should not be seen in public.
When I look back on my childhood, I can see so clearly how insanely hyper-sexualized the female body was. All throughout pop culture, there was always someone trying to peek through a hole in the wall of the girls’ locker room, a camera cutting away just before a stripper’s “big reveal,” movie after movie of high school boys making off with their dad’s Penthouse magazines. It was some kind of sexual Pavlovian experiment in which we were being trained to see the female body as overtly sexual.
While I have no objection to breasts being considered beautiful or sexual (they are), it’s dangerous that we consider these their only qualities.
No one should get to decide that the female body is sexual, and therefore obscene. This positions us as one-dimensional sexual tokens who must submit to being “managed” so we don’t corrupt anyone with our lewd, pornographic bodies. Hence why we are encouraged to drape a sheet over ourselves when breastfeeding our children in public. Hence why Instagram reserves the right to delete our photos and even accounts if we show our nipples. Hence why the two articles in which I posted photos of my nipples never got chosen for further distribution, despite the fact that they didn’t break any of the community guidelines here.
I’m passionate about fighting to insist that we desexualize breasts. Again, not because they cannot be or are not sometimes sexual, but because, as we can plainly see from biology, they are not solely sexual.
And women must be allowed to exist as more than sexual objects.
© Yael Wolfe 2021
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