Nipples: What’s the Big Deal?
My biggest fear when I was acting on stage wasn’t the people in the audience or forgetting my lines, it was my nipples. There was a habit of having air conditioning on blast due to the hot stage lights and I knew my nipples would erect at the lightest breeze and at one point, I’d have to take my dress off and be in only a slip. No matter how thick the padding of my bra is, those nipples poke through.
Women’s bodies have been sexualized forever and the nipple is at times, a very scandalous piece of our bodies. Ironic because men also have nipples. Theirs look indistinguishable from ours. There was a trend where people would Photoshop male nipples over women to get around censorship. Since we have no issue with men walking around topless and posting shirtless pics all over social media but a woman’s bare nipples will open up the third portal to hell if it is shown in the light of day.
The main difference is that our nipples are attached to our breasts which have also been highly sexualized. Can we just sit here for a minute and realize how ridiculous it is that women who are breastfeeding their babies in public still get shamed if they don’t drown their baby under a blanket? As if the sight of a woman’s breast while she is feeding her child, is somehow wrong or sexual? It isn’t. There is nothing sexual about it and if it makes you uncomfortable when you are out and see a woman feeding her child like this, it’s you who is twisting a natural act into something it’s not.
Back to my stage days. I didn’t have an issue with the fact that my nipples would probably be able to be seen from the back rows, but it made the men uncomfortable which made me uncomfortable. Long story short, the way society had continually overly placed sexual context to women’s breasts and nipples, made something as innocuous as air conditioning into a big concern for me, when it shouldn’t have been.
I remember reading the National Geographic magazines when growing up and there were often bare chested women from far away places who proudly displayed their breasts and nipples. As a young teen I wanted to go to those places because it seemed the women there, no matter their breast size, could be free to walk around. My perception at the time was that because I was large chested at 13, my boobs were the only thing anyone saw. The high-school boys always stared at my chest, especially some of the older guys and that made me super uncomfortable and I felt shame.
From the moment I developed breasts, there hasn’t been a moment where I didn’t have to think about them. My first concern is always making sure the nipple is covered and then how much cleavage I’m showing. If my nipples were hard I’d be called a slut. Yeah, because we can control what they do. Some of us, from all genders, just have super sensitive nipples that turn hard if your shirt moves weird across them or you sneeze or a dozen other reasons that are natural functions of the body, you know, like nipples getting hard are just a natural function of the body.
I have been criticized both in personal and professional settings for my breasts. I was once told, while in the Air Force, that I needed to wear two bras to smoosh them down more because their size was too distracting, even under my uniform. I was being held responsible for my breasts turning on or distracting others. How is that my fault? Isn’t that just putting other people’s behavior on to me? Why are we so obsessed with women’s nipples and breasts?
It is often attributed to the Victorian era which is where we saw this great sense of “purity” thrust upon women in the western world. Queen Victoria had power and influence in a way that you may attribute to major celebrity influencers today. She was supposedly traumatized from her overly sexual mother and when she came into influence, she decided to push this sense of modesty, purity and femininity onto society. While much has changed since then, this societal idea of controlling and dictating what a “good woman” is supposed to look like, persists to this day.
There is nothing more frustrating to me when I realize that something like this has been ingrained in me and the rest of society. That somewhere along the line, someone decided to sexualize an innocent part of a woman’s body and for generations that sense of shame and dirtiness has been thrust upon us for no reason. Even knowing what I know, I still struggle with shame over my breasts and nipples and it makes me damn mad.
My hope is that perhaps one good outcome from the pandemic will be relaxed standards set on people’s appearances. We have already ditched bras when stuck at home all day and masks have allowed us all to care less about how our face looks.
One could hope that our society is changing how we view physical appearances but I think we have a long way to go before those Victorian attitudes dissipate. Besides, if anyone is going to sexualize my breasts, it’s going to be me, when and where I want to.
