Blood Is Fine, Nipples Are Not

The argument Lina Esco was making with Free the Nipple was not subtle, but it didn’t need to be. American media—network television, social platforms, the full infrastructure of mass-distributed image—had no problem with blood, with war footage, with bodies in states of advanced damage, but a topless woman? Full institutional crisis. Parents’ groups, church organizations, the FCC’s nervous system lighting up like a pinball machine.

Esco, along with Lola Kirke, Casey LaBow, Monique Coleman, and Janeane Garofalo, turned that contradiction into a campaign and eventually a film. The premise was simple: women should be able to go topless under the same conditions men can, without it being automatically classified as obscene. Several US states already had laws permitting exactly that. Nobody had apparently thought to mention it.

What I find genuinely strange is how much institutional weight that one taboo carries. Strip away the legal question and what you’re left with is a culture that decided, at some point, that one configuration of the human chest is neutral and another is pornographic, and has been defending that decision with enormous energy ever since. The violence stays. The nipple doesn’t. And we’ve all more or less agreed not to notice how insane that is—or to notice, shrug, and keep watching the violence.