I didn’t realize I hated bras until I stopped wearing them. A couple months ago, in a crisis of womanly self-determination I suppose only a millennial or someone politically active in the 60s could properly understand, I decided to ban brassieres from my wardrobe. Formerly a neurotic, even-in-bed bra-wearer, I was bemused to discover during a late night Google binge that they, in fact, have no medical benefits and questionable (at best) aesthetic benefits. Today, my breasts remain steadfastly high above my stomach, I skip mediocre events with promises of free lingerie, and I’m constantly terrified my parents will find out what I’ve done (hi, Dad!).
Why? Because there’s a good chance my parents–who once sent me to a school-sponsored water gun fight armed with a Windex bottle–are more uptight than the audience of Live! With Kelly, and that crowd went batshit last week when they mistook the darts on Kelly’s Stella McCartney “Miracle” dress for nipples. Not giant swastika-shaped PEZ dispensers doling out free ecstasy… just nipples. The show received so many letters, Kelly actually apologized on-air at the start of the second segment. “Everyone knows I had my nipples removed years ago,” quipped Kelly. Maybe she should have.
Socially preferable nipple-less women are never more than a few clicks of the photo editor’s mouse away. Victoria’s Secret models are notoriously nipple-free in their ads, most fashion magazines will nix even the shadow of a nipple beneath a sheer shirt, and the creator of Desperate Housewives claims to spend $100,000/week digitally editing tapes to get rid of nipples that show through clothing. Even Barbie, in all her titanic tits glory, has no nipples. The Super Bowl wouldn’t let anyone under 50 perform for years after the Janet Jackson slip.
Back in 2009, the ladies of Loreffrey Studios became fascinated with questions about society’s censorship craze, like, “Does getting rid of nipples truly desexualize a naked woman?” So naturally they took their tops off and digitally removed their nipples for the Nipple Non Grata project. The result is funhouse-freaky, with boobs that look a lot like overgrown skin tags (alright for the person with a Dr. Scholl’s fetish), but it wasn’t like they were trying to be particularly sexy in the photos either.
Worse is what happens to nipples when we, in typical Western-civ schizophrenic fashion, pretend to like the perky bits for five minutes of every decade. “Designer” nipples, in the form of plastic and more plastic, burst onto the scene after Samantha wore stick-on nipples in a Sex and the City episode and Victoria Beckham flaunted her Fembot-worthy nips for all the paparazzi. In 2009, London’s Harley Medical Group reported a 30 per cent rise in nipple augmentation surgeries. Throughout the decades, bras with built-in nipples have come and gone (most recently incarnated by Victoria’s Secret) to offer ladies the can’t-live-without option of a “braless-look-bra.”
Whether we’re erasing or synthetically super-sizing them, the war on nipples is really just one more battle in the war on women. Why should we have to hide behind padded bras and digital retouching because our natural state might turn on a man? Shaming women for bearing nipples is only a step removed from blaming rape victims for dressing so slutty. (Note that men’s nipples are free to parade their perkiness whenever-wherever, despite having no actual physiological purpose.)
The female body is societally more “acceptable” when it’s less recognizable as such. But the female body shouldn’t aim to be acceptable… it should just be.
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Sabrina Maddeaux is a Toronto Standard style writer who hates a lot of trends. Follow her on Twitter at @sabrinamaddeaux.
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