One Bare Nipple, Apparently, Is One Too Many

When Steve Jobs declared, with the calm certainty of someone who has never once questioned his own taste, that no device bearing an Apple logo would ever display a bare nipple, he probably wasn’t anticipating a counteroffensive from a website full of tattooed women. But that’s what he got.

SuicideGirls had their iPhone app pulled after Jobs announced he was keeping porn off his platforms. The response from Missy, the site’s founder and its permanent first face, was to announce a full mobile-web rebuild—optimized galleries, proper profiles, and more skin than any app store would ever permit. A website exists outside the walled garden. Jobs couldn’t touch it. That was the point.

I’ve always had complicated feelings about SuicideGirls. The tattoos-and-alternative-aesthetic package was genuinely countercultural when it launched, and then gradually became its own kind of uniform. The contracts have been criticized, the empowerment framing picked apart by people who know more about it than I do. None of that makes Jobs right. His particular brand of puritanism—pristine product design on the outside, total control of everything inside—was always the most unsettling part of the Apple proposition. The App Store as moral arbiter is a strange thing to accept in exchange for a nice phone.

Women making a deliberate choice to stay naked on their own terms, outside the walled garden, seems like the correct response. You can argue about everything else later.