Nipple Equality

I believe that the current generation of teens will be responsible for ending topfree inequality in America, and a case brewing in Michigan could be a spark to ignite the change.

The attorney for a 14 year-old girl who took a topless photo of herself and was subsequently suspended from school is arguing that the discipline was sex discrimination since male students would not have been punished for doing the same thing. But there is much disagreement with the attorney's contention.

"It is not sex discrimination," said Anita Allen (professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School), who specializes in privacy and sex discrimination issues. "It is considered indecent for a woman to appear in public undressed. ... Courts have upheld those laws, even though they obviously don't apply to men."How does the law justify the difference in treatment? "Three thousand years of Western culture," Allen said.

I really despise this sort of argument which justifies current injustice by invoking history. After all, it was also Western culture which mounted the Crusades, burned women as witches, enslaved an entire race of people, tried to exterminate the Jews, etc. History is the means by which we learn NOT to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Paul Rapoport of TERA has weighed in on the case.

"The girl did nothing wrong. She should be left alone -- it's her decision," Rapoport said. "The body is nothing to be ashamed of. I think everybody needs to calm down and shrug it off...The American obsession with female breasts is just boiling over."

But the real culprit here is the female nipple. Americans seem to have little problem with women showing plenty of décolletage, but it's when that pesky nipple makes an appearance that seems to set the world on fire. The Bare Oaks blogger hits the nail on the head.

Even the definition of breasts is problematic. You can't differentiate between men and women by breast size. Some men have larger breasts than some women. Trying to define where the breast starts and ends is almost impossible. Where is the edge of the breast?

So we are generally left with legal definitions that only refer to the nipple and areola. That means that breasts are not bare if pasties cover the nipple and areola area. Clearly, society is now telling us that the only part of concern is the nipple and areola area on a woman's body.

It really is a form of mass hysteria arising from moral panic. Where else but in America could the case of Janet Jackson's fleeting nipple exposure on network television reach the highest court in the land? It really is madness.

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any female nipple, or the sight of one, has ever harmed anybody, either physically or psychologically. Americans still cling to an old Puritanical belief that the exposure of the female breast is somehow immoral.

It's inevitable that someday we will wake up as a country and stop criminalizing women for exposing their nipples, no matter what age. Eventually a court will have to come down on the side of equal rights under the law instead of using "history" as a lame excuse for sexual discrimination. If women can die for their country, just like men, then they should be able to sunbathe topfree, just like men.

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