A nation never nude?

As I was scrolling through my Facebook news feed accidentally auto-watching step-by-step cooking videos and pancake art creations, I stumbled across a video with “nudity” in the title and obviously needed to watch it.

After I watched it, I felt I needed to talk about it. ATTN:, a media and publishing company from Los Angeles, launched a video comparing the difference between nudity in Europe and America.

This video talks about how in Europe full frontal nudity is regularly seen on TV and in public. To Europeans, nudity isn’t always a sexual thing. Meanwhile, in America, nudity is a taboo. TV broadcasters in the U.S. can’t show nudity on the air between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Jon Stewart made fun of this saying, “I’m glad someone’s out there protecting America’s delicate sensibilities pre-10 p.m.”

In America, public nudity is often considered “indecent exposure” and is actually a punishable crime. In Europe, however, Munich has legalized nudity in six “Urban Naked Zones,” Denmark legalized nakedness on all public beaches in 1976, and the Netherlands legalized “recreational nudity” back in 1985. So why then, when talking about exposed body parts, do Americans frown upon recreational nudity more than recreational marijuana?

Out of all 50 wonderfully clothed states in America, only New York, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas have explicitly legalized toplessness of both men and women in public places. On the flip side, good old Utah is one of the handful of states that went out of its way to include breast-feeding mothers in the category of “public lewdness.” In Louisiana, an exposed nipple could land you in jail for three years.

What is so indecent about female nipples anyway? Take a trip down to Fremont Street in Vegas, or even to The One and Only here in St. George on a Friday, and you’ll see plenty of indecent things that aren’t nipples. It’s perfectly acceptable for women to wear excessively low-cut shirts and booty shorts that could pass as cheeky underwear — but the minute the nipple comes out, it’s too much.

This concept reminds me of those times as a kid when I would ask my annoying younger sister not to touch me. She’d get her hands as close to my face as possible saying, “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you.” As long as a woman keeps her nipple hidden, she has her hand in the face of the law, and she only touches the law with her areola? It doesn’t make sense. The dictionary defines the word “indecent” as something obscene, naughty, vulgar, or gross. So why don’t the media and society redefine the way we look at the female nipple until it is no longer a synonym for these words?

And why should we care? Because the battle for the right to bare breasts is just a stepping stone on the path to stopping female oppression. You might be familiar with the “Free the Nipple” campaign, which launched after a woman, Phoenix Freeley, was arrested for being topless in public in 2005. Free The Nipple focuses on the gender-equality side of toplessness. Why can a group of middle-aged men participate in a shirts versus skins basketball game at a local park while if a woman takes her top off everyone loses their minds?

We can blame the oversexualization of women for this. No one would have an issue with a topless dog-walker or a breastfeeding mother if society treated breasts like body parts instead of fun bags. Over time, the media has molded the female body into something so sexual that even the mention of the word “titty” makes Mormon boys erect. In reality, if you look closely at the female and male nipples, they look exactly the same. Who knew? So why is one considered sexual while the other isn’t?

At the end of the day, it all stems from an immature social mindset; a nip is a nip just as much as a toe is a toe. And at the end of the day, it’s all about equality.