MICOL HEBRON
Micol Hebron is a feminist artist, writer, and teacher. Much of her recent work is about the hypocrisy of Instagram allowing male nipples yet banning photos of female nipples. Hebron’s fight with social media began in 2014 during the exhibition “Thanks for the Mammaries”, a breast cancer fundraiser. The artist went to the show topless. Hebron says “There was nothing sexualized about me showing up topless”. It was a celebration of breasts, surviving cancer, and an homage to her mother.
Photos of Hebron from the exhibition were removed from Facebook the next day. Images of Hebron topless were flagged as inappropriate because they showed “female nipples”. Hebron was shocked. As a response she took an open source Wikimedia image of a male nipple and started superimposing it over her own. Very quickly the Male Nipple Pasty went viral with many artists using the concept to protest Instagram. (NOTE: the Wikimedia entry for nipple has since been replaced from a white male nipple to a dark skinned female nipple).
“So many things seem absurd about the female nipple ban. Why are female nipples prohibited and not male nipples? The implication is that female nipples are automatically and by default “sexual” and therefore inappropriate. It is almost as if Facebook/Instagram are admitting that it – and society – can not help but see women’s bodies as threatening, sexual objects. And this implies that women do not have autonomy; they do not have control or final say in how their bodies are seen and perceived. Society is categorizing them as sexual objects to be consumed – and worse, that consumption is some kind of elicit pleasure, for which the female body should be punished by being silenced and unseen.
Secondly, how can Facebook or Instagram tell if I am a female or a male, just by looking at my nipples? This is an essentialist, cissexist view – implying that if you have longer, fattier nipples (and mammaries), you are a female, and if you have small, flatter, hairy nipples, you are a male. So, what does Facebook/Instagram do about transmen and transwomen? What about gender nonconforming, nonbinary, and genderqueer folks? As if society hasn’t marginalized these bodies enough already, to have a gender identity imposed upon a body based on nipples, and not one’s own declaration of being (“I am male” “I am female”, “I am gender nonconforming”), is another slap in the face.” - MICOL HEBRON
IMAGE CREDIT: Images Courtesy The Artist, Micol Hebron.