Nudity and sexual content policies tend to vary on social media platforms: including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. However, most nudity policies are consistent about one thing: banning images showing the female nipple.
Juliette Duran, San Jose State business marketing junior and president of “She’s the First,” said while men can shamelessly flaunt their mammary glands with pride, women are held to a double standard.
She’s the First is a CSU-wide club that focuses on empowering women across the world, according to their website.
“We want ‘everybody to be equal,’ yet men have it easier,” Duran said during a Zoom interview. “The rules don't apply to them and I think that's odd because I can look at a man shirtless and think ‘he's sexy,’ just as a man can look at me shirtless and think I'm sexy. So if we both have sexual thoughts, why are their nipples allowed to be shown and mine are not?”
Tanya Bakhru, a Women, Gender and Sexuality studies professor, said women's nipples are censored because the media is male-dominated and men sexualize them.
“I think this kind of double standard about nipples is really reflective of a larger double standard around how men and women's bodies are portrayed and also consumed in the media and the scrutiny that women's bodies undergo in a way that men's bodies don't,” Bakhru said through Zoom.
Images of female nipples are seen as offensive by some social media sites because of an inherent male-dominated desire to control women and how they express themselves, Bakhru said.
“I think that's what it boils down to, this double standard that we have about men's bodies being subjects and women's bodies being objects. [In our current culture] women's bodies exist for others and men's bodies exist for themselves,” Bakhru said.
Bakhru said nipple bias is deeply ingrained in western culture, objectifying women.
It’s not just men who perpetuate these biases. Many women in powerful positions allow for such biases to continue because they’re used to the American patriarchal system of power, Bakhru said.
“Even when women hold those spaces, they're often women who are really deeply invested in a racist, patriarchal system and they're benefiting from that so they're going to uphold those principles for their own gain,” Bakhru said.
Arlene Spilker, a graduate nursing professor and nurse since 1989, said men need to take time to self-reflect and think about where these biases stem from.
“A lot of men have been socialized to be like this. We're supposed to enjoy the female body and pornography and all of that kind of stuff,” Spilker said in a Zoom interview. “But we should be better than that. We should recognize that [breastfeeding is] our baser instincts and if you're triggered by a pair of breasts, I wonder what else you're triggered by.”
However, this bias is not just confined to Instagram feeds and Twitter posts. In western society, breastfeeding is shunned away.
According to a Nov. 2, 2015 poll by Start4Life, a public health website focused on childcare, said one in five people who took the survey felt women shouldn’t breastfeed in public, with 60% of women reporting they take steps to hide breastfeeding in public.
Spilker said expecting a woman to go somewhere private when breastfeeding is ridiculous.
“If you examine why am I so freaked out about this, like, what if that was my daughter? What if that was my granddaughter and she needed to be fed? What would I think? Or would I turn to the other side and say she needs to eat? The kid needs to eat! I think it's completely ridiculous,” Spilker said.
Spilker believes female nipples should be more accepted by western society because, in reality, there's not really anything special about them.
“I mean, nipples are nipples, some breasts are bigger than others, I've seen 1,000s of sets of breasts in my long career. There's this quote from Notting Hill, ‘like what is it with men and breasts? They're just breasts! Every other person on the planet has them,’ ” Spilker said.
