My mother raised me with a dichotomy of ideals regarding my body. For one, it is a temple, to be treated with utmost respect. But it is also a weapon against myself: exposing too much of it would “invite” unwanted attention. Such is the understanding of women like me, raised on this very specific misogynistic Eastern European rhetoric. Scarier still is that this understanding persists in a generation raised in a so-called “free” country on brassiere burning and “The Feminine Mystique”; for all of our “progress,” we still haven’t managed to move forward.
My body, I was brought to believe, is a tool of leverage — if I revealed too much, then I left nothing to the imagination. I sent out the “wrong message,” that I am “cheap” or easy, any man’s plaything. This operates under the absurd notion that something you wear reflects your sexual preferences, that a certain skirt means that you’re ready to bed anybody that asks – which shouldn’t concern others anyway – or that another article of clothing absolves one of the same sentiment.
There was never a message I wanted to send out. I resented that my dress, my skin, and my existence would always be a statement. I would never simply be a human, but only a series of signals – a broken traffic light.
In acts of rebellion, I pierced holes in myself, asserting that this body is mine and I will do whatever I damn well please with it. But my mother’s voice is still present: to this day I can’t bring myself to get a tattoo. It is too permanent, too much of an imposition on my temple. Clothes can be changed, piercings removed, but there is something about altering my skin forever that I can’t get past.
I realize now that my reluctance is linked to nudity, in the value I place on it. Ink would serve as an irremovable layer that kept me from being completely naked, as if I were rejecting my body in its natural form. But I resent the constant attention paid to my body. Why do we care so much about nudity? Or more precisely, why are we so afraid of it?
There’s social unrest over this issue all over the world. FEMEN, originally a radical movement from Ukraine, has a clear objective of “fighting against the patriarchy,” which they achieve by protesting topless in front of churches, government offices, and various landmarks. They believe that the male-dominated world order has stripped women of ownership over their own bodies. The manifestation of the naked female body is therefore a form of liberation, making female nudity a “gravedigger” of the patriarchal system. Their tactic, “sextremism,” undermines traditional female sexualization and oppression. In the face of intimidations, surveillance, and death threats, they were forced to move their organization to Paris, France.
Stateside, there’s the Go Topless group, which in an interview with The Atlantic, says, “its objective is not to push for a world where everyone goes sans shirt, but rather to push back against what they see as an infringement of women’s constitutional right not to be discriminated against on the basis of gender.” The laws governing censorship and public nudity favor the male gaze over women’s freedom of expression. This article stated that the problem was “perpetuating a degrading cultural norm towards sexualizing women’s bodies without their consent.” The group stages Go Topless Days annually to support topfreedom – the movement for the recognition of any person’s right to be topless in public.
We have arbitrarily assigned shame and ignobility to certain parts of our body. We need campaigns like “Free the Nipple” to challenge the stigma assigned to our temples. Why is it a-okay to expose everything but the nipple? And why are breasts taboo in our modern, hypersexual age but wholly acceptable in art? Who decides that nipples on Instagram are worthy of censorship but those depicted in Renaissance frescoes are not? To draw such a distinction is not only a form of censorship, but also a form of blatant sexism. This is not to say that art isn’t also censored-in May 2015, a Fox News affiliate in New York censored the breasts on a Picasso painting that had broken records at a recent auction-but we seem most uncomfortable with breasts in the real world, as opposed to their fetishized form in art, film, and fiction.
We seem to fear the primal aspects of our existence. We shame the nipple because of its functionality, and we are accustomed to treating our bodies like ornaments instead of highly complex systems. The irony is glaring and inexcusable; mainstream culture grows more and more sex-obsessed every day, yet the progress that should theoretically come with such exposure is absent. Photographs of breastfeeding are blocked from Facebook, but Dolce & Gabbana commercials can hyper-sexualize women without fear of repercussions so long as they cover her nipples. Thousands of women agree with this notion, and the Free the Nipple campaign garnered tremendous attention on social media last summer, with support from celebrities and activists alike.
Talking over my mother’s voice is the collective anger of a group of women blooming into their sexuality, demanding agency over their actions and their meanings. They insist that nudity has no objective meaning until we assign it ourselves. People can carry their own values, their own moral code. We are too different in experience and background to all adhere to fixed notions of what our bodies should look like and what nudity signifies.
However, notions of control over female bodies and nudity continue to reinforce paradoxical ideas. Female body images remains in flux. Women are told that they should be strong, ignore the voice telling them to lose weight or look perfect, love themselves, yet are exposed to nearly identical-looking models of women with digitally-modified bodies on every media system imaginable. The sexualization of the naked female form not only turns me into a traffic light, but it also compels countless other women to scrutinize their own bodies with a male gaze. It’s an imposition on our bodies and our culture.
The argument against public female toplessness, which is illegal in many U.S. states and countries around the world, is that the display of the body is an inherently sexual act. We have inextricably linked nudity to sex, and in doing so we have turned our bodies into symbols. Our task is to move nudity away from the metaphorical realm and into the physical realm. Detaching sex from nudity is the first step to putting all bodies on equal standing and lift the stigma.
Images: Kate Vlessis
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