There are 2 sides to every fight. And 2 possible motives for any type of activism. For example, you may want to "Free the Nipple" because you love women and want them to be free, or you may simply fear sexy women with beautiful breasts and want to limit their freedom.
After all, what better way to get laws passed against professional models than to claim they somehow prevent regular women from freely enjoying their bodies?
Make sexy women the enemy and voila! - Free The Nipple becomes Censor The Nipple.
NoMorePage3 in England is the perfect example.
From a different angle, legalized toplessness in Ontario, Canada tried to free women and limit professional toplessness by including a prohibition against toplessness for commercial purposes. Without that prohibition, authorities no doubt believed thousands of women would have gone topless in public for photographers, movies, television, websites etc, creating a climate of unacceptable acceptability for public toplessness.
Instead, almost no women went topless, not even for the simple reason that it was too hot out.
It will be the same in the media. Unless commercial images of topless women are allowed in public, women will not feel free to go topless in the media or in the streets. Yet it is precisely these kinds of commercial images of sexy women that many activists have now turned against, including, judging from some of their tweets, those at Free the Nipple.
Haters have a way of taking over every emotionally charged movement and this one may be no exception. The equality feminists at Free The Nipple are being sidelined more and more by the anti-sex radicals among them.
It is ironic that when making the movie Free The Nipple the topless stars were not harassed by the police until they actually started filming. The police believed the topless women might encourage people to start shooting porn in the streets of New York.
This naive belief that commercial nudity will lead to porn and porn to depravity and mayhem is what the makers of Free the Nipple had to sneak around to get their movie made. And it's this same fear and suspicion of commercial nudity they will have to drop themselves if their movement is going to free women, rather than inspire more censorship and possibly even less freedom than before.
Thus we find ourselves hoping Free the Nipple will remember one simple fact: your film is commercial nudity. Don't let the haters out there turn you from wanting to free women to wanting to censor them.
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