If you are a movie fanatic, you might recall the 1934 classic “It Happened One Night,” starring Clark Gable. Apart from its thoughtful humor and delightful romance, the movie is also significant in pioneering the first bare male torso. Gable, the leading actor who played the role of reporter Peter Wayne, was the first in film to sport a nude chest and abdominals, which not only plummeted the sale of undershirts but revolutionized Hollywood for the years to follow. Soon after it became widely socially acceptable to expose the male upper body in the media.
Today, however, the female breasts still undergo legal limitation in regards to the public eye, with Canada being the only other North American country to partially permit female toplessness. Though the United States is slowly working its way up to absolute, genderless body exhibition in cahoots with egalitarian principles with cities like Honolulu, Hawaii and New York City at the forefront of success, the subject is still very highly controversial.
A major counterargument to the Free the Nipple campaign is the concern that the baring of the female breasts is harmful and indecent on many tokens. When you break down the argument, however, it likely traces back to the fear of vulgarity, diversion and desexualization of a very much hypersexualized body part. In regards to censorship, it is quite understandable as to why a parent might not want their child to view particular body parts in public at such a young age, but why must the female body be the only one to be criminalized? Many are concerned that the exposing of breasts would be distracting to everyday life. If women, and men too, can view the male body at no cost and freely go about their days then it should be no different. Women wouldn’t exactly be noisily parading the streets at all possible hours drowning the country in a sea of boobs.
The campaign is meant to decriminalize the innocent exposition of breasts in plausible situations like breast feeding, swimming, exercising and any other instance in which a man can rightfully unclothe. Being topless in a restaurant, male or female, is comprehensibly prohibited and in violation of customer health procedure. The movement strives for no different a message than this equalizing implementation does. In addition to this, many argue that female admirers will be desensitized to the eroticism that exists with the female bust. This, of course, is nonsense. The male upper body can be found in countless divisions of the media across the globe, and you don’t exactly see frequent hordes of picketing protesters in complaint of a loss of admiration for a nice pair of male pectorals or an octet of newly etched abdominals.
The androcentric standpoint that this Anti-Free the Nipple argument attempts to justify not only further perpetuates sexism by placing the male need before the female, but yields to the concept that women are rightful victims of unnecessary sexualization that sabotages their equal rights. Sure an occasional public boob might be a little bizarre to some at first if the movement were to gain complete success, and that is understandable. When it becomes a social norm, however, the fuss, bulgy eyes and double glances will die down the same way the big media frenzy regarding a bare-chested Clark Gable did. While this won’t happen in an instant, it’s a huge step in the right direction.
The Free the Nipple movement is not about enabling promiscuity in women, and it most certainly is not an unnecessarily spiteful let’s-shove-it-in-their-faces project in the age of the so-called height of radical feminazis. Don’t be mistaken — if new laws were passed tomorrow stating that men needed to cover up their ears because it is deemed too sexually distracting and inappropriate, despite its unfortunate infliction of hearing complications, this would also be very wrong. So why should a mother nurturing her child with the natural process of breastfeeding or a dehydrated, overheated women caught in sticky 100-degree weather feel restricted? Why should we have to explain to our puzzled poolside six-year-old daughters why the boys have no shirts and the girls do? Frankly, there is really no good answer other than the ongoing misogyny crisis that has played out for far too many centuries. Equality is an important message to convey to future generations and we are getting closer and closer with each passing lifetime. After all, we are all human beings. Support Free the Nipple and do your part to shatter the glass ceiling and attempt to grasp the freedom that lies beyond it.