Miley Cyrus has spent the majority of 2013 with very little clothing on – from her flesh-toned bikini at her MTV VMA 2013 performance to swinging around nude on a demolition in her video “Wrecking Ball”, we’ve pretty much seen it all.
Over the weekend, Miley tweeted a picture of her pulling up her Chanel sweatshirt to reveal her bare breasts, but with two strategically placed red hearts that say “Merry Christmas”.
Before you judge Miley for selling sex and being indecent during the holiday season, let it be known that Miley’s actually got a feministic reason behind her action.
Free the Nipple is not just a provocative Twitter handle she made up. It’s actually the name of an upcoming feature film by actress and political activist, Lina Esco. The film is about a topless warrior who questions why breasts are seen as indecent.
“The nipple is the first thing we connect with when we are born,” said Esco. “It nourishes us. When did it become so obscene? I don’t understand.”
Free the Nipple aims to change “backward censorship laws that force police to arrest women for the most basic human right, to breastfeed your child in public or to be topless on a beach”.
“In New York, I was walking around topless and this woman told me to hide my breasts, and she was covering her kid’s eyes, like I was the worst person on the planet,” said Esco. “I said, ‘Would you rather your kid see violence than nipples and breasts?’ And she said, ‘I would rather he see all the violence in the world than this.’”
“How do we allow this violence,” Esco asked, “But a girl running around topless is obscene and wrong?”
Esco’s point makes us question women’s role in society. We’re not telling every woman to walk down the streets bare-chested, but shouldn’t it at least be considered decent? Call us liberals, but equality is what Free the Nipple, and Miley are fighting for.
Miley has also defended a case similar to Free the Nipple and the sexualization of women. In the October issue of Rolling Stones, Miley pointed out the double standards she was faced with when she was slut-shamed for her MTV VMA performance with Robin Thicke.
“No one is talking about the man behind the ass. It was a lot of ‘Miley twerks on Robin Thicke,’ but never, ‘Robin Thicke grinds up on Miley’. They’re only talking about the one that bent over. So obviously there’s a double standard.”
Despite her highly sexual image that the majority of us seem to disapprove of, Miley has her reasons for doing so. Whether or not her image sells, we criticize her when all she’s probably trying to do is prove to us just how our minds are set to judge a woman who bares her skin.
Watch the Free the Nipple trailer:
Learn more about the Free the Nipple campaign here.
