Last year, @Badgirlriri (aka Rihanna) posted photos featuring her nipples on Instagram.

Following her heroism, Scout Willis shared topless photos to her Twitter and Instagram accounts with the now infamous hashtag #freethenipple, in protest against the social media outlet’s female nipple ban.

With that, a movement was birthed—and allowed to suckle the naked teat of the media.

The campaign has grown to showcase 269,422 #freethenipple posts on Instagram.

Women the world over have embraced the movement. Willis stated in an interview with The Independent that the campaign has ultimately been a success as it has ignited “conversations about gender equality and body positivity that are both necessary and sorely lacking.”

Conversations that do not involve domestic violence. Conversations that do not aid in the reduction of infant females circumcised daily.

Conversations that have absolutely nothing to to do with anti-rape advocacy and don’t take into account the half a million women who have reportedly experienced physical or sexual assault in the past 12 months and the one in five women who experience sexual violence after the age of fifteen.

The #freethenipple campaign has led to a gross misdirection of attention that tells women that by showing their nipples on Instagram they are making a great contribution to feminism; meanwhile, female infants continue to be circumcised in the Middle East.

A great contribution that tells women that to be a true feminist is to objectify oneself but that at a few taps of the screen our work here is done. These pictures which so easily filter into mainstream media thanks to their NSFW value misdirect popular attention and lead us to believe that the greatest contribution that we can make to feminism is female nudity.

If we keep popularizing the campaign that is calling for the equality of the male and female nipple online (let’s make a distinction here, because they are one and the same in the real world…or do you men want to try suckling a child for 12 months or deal with fairly consistent catcalls linked to those very female nipples?), all we will ever have is equal online nipples, while women (humans) continue being raped, trafficked, circumcised for “medical benefits.”

Our culture is such that easy online activism has replaced a need to action and with a link shared our conscience is easily appeased. Sharing a naked photo on Instagram screams loudly of the type of activism that called Facebook users to change their profile pictures to a Disney character to end child abuse. It’s ironic and sickening and promotes the kind of chronic social laziness that allows conservatives to call this type of feminism hedonism.

Miley Cyrus’s Merry Christmas snap was an ode to the freedom of New York—one of the few places in America where nipples are free to roam uncovered. I wonder how many of Sydney’s 105,000 homeless are concerned over this freedom? What about the 39,000 child brides that marry daily?

#freethenipple really is a #firstworldproblem.

Instagram hashtags of #freethenipple: at time of writing, 269,422 posts.

Domestic violence hashtags: 103,413 posts.

Anti-rape advocacy: #rapeculture 35,882 posts, #antirape 3,256 posts.

Anti-homelessness: #homelessness 28,811 posts.

 

 

 

Relephant:

10-Year-Old Divorcée Reminds Us that Female Oppression Is Here & Now.

Freed Nipples Still Causing A Storm. {Nude Photos}

 

Author: Charlotte O’Neill

Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: chrisalban at Flickr