In 2012, Lina Esco introduced the phrase “Free the Nipple” to the collective consciousness with a campaign (followed by a movie of the same name) to decriminalize and de-stigmatize female nudity in public. The movement quickly caught on (with the help of attention from celebrities like Rihanna, Chelsea Handler and Miley Cyrus, with women mobilizing in hordes against public toplessness laws as well as rules — namely Instagram’s — banning women’s nipples from social media (while allowing men to freely reveal the same body parts without shame or consequence). Instagram later clarified in their community guidelines that "photos of post-mastectomy scarring and women actively breastfeeding are allowed. Nudity in photos of paintings and sculptures is OK, too."
Being topless is what we had to do [to] start a real dialogue about equality,” Lina told Time in 2014, when her film was released. “This is not about being topless; this [is] about equality, it’s about having that choice.”
And while Free the Nipple may have initially focused on being literally, completely topless; the movement has also come to encompass conversations about going bra-less under clothes. In fact, in the past couple years, while celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Camila Mendes, and Bella Thorne have been demonstrating and speaking out about freeing the nipple beneath the fabric; students across the U.S. have mobilized against sexist dress codes; with one of the most salient points being the requirement to wear bras. This year, high school students in Florida staged a “bracott” that went viral after their dean told 17-year-old Lizzy Martinez to put Band-Aids over her nipples because she wasn’t wearing a bra. And two years ago, the protest, No Bra, No Problem, went viral after a student was disciplined because her lack of a bra reportedly “made someone uncomfortable.” But what that didn’t take into account was the fact that wearing a bra — or being called out for not doing so — makes someone else uncomfortable: the person with the breasts.
Not that that fact is necessarily surprising. “Women’s bodies are seen as contested terrain in public space,” Deborah J. Cohan, an associate professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort, tells Teen Vogue. “For example, pregnant women experience unsolicited advice as well as strangers touching their bellies; the right to choose around pregnancy and abortion remain relentlessly contested; women nursing babies in public, and basically everything related to women’s bodies seems like fair game for waging war on women and on advancements made by feminism, as well as for shaming women.”
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