Free the Nipple: Fighting for Women's Rights

“I’m not promoting toplessness here,” director Lina Esco, 29, says about her new movie Free the Nipple, a fictional story about women protesting censorship laws by taking off their shirts in New York. “But without the toplessness no one would talk about equality for men and women. That’s the sad truth. I wish I lived somewhere where they would, but Americans love shock. They love controversy.”

What Esco—who’s also an actress—is really after, she says, is a conversation about how women aren’t yet treated as equal to men, including the idea that their nipples are indecent while guys’ are benign. “You can show women’s beheadings on Facebook,” Esco says, “but their nipples are the most obscene thing you can show. It’s about the double standard. Men have the right to take their tops off. Women should too.”

Lola Kirk (Liv) and Lina Esco (With) in Esco’s Free The Nipple. Photo: Courtesy of Bérénice Eveno. Copyright Disruptive Films Inc. 

Free the Nipple, which opens Friday in theaters and on video on demand, stars Esco as a journalist and Lola Kirke (Girls star Jemima’s sister) as a free-spirited crusader for women’s rights. Celebrities like Lena Dunham, Liv Tyler, Cara Delevingne, Scout Willis, and Miley Cyrus are supporting the film (Cyrus recorded a cover of Melanie Safka’s “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma” for it)—and the movement. In May, Willis walked around topless in New York to protest Instagram’s policy of banning the areola—Rihanna’s photos have been affected by this—and posted the pictures on Twitter. “What @instagram won’t let you see #FreeTheNipple,” she wrote.

In New York, it is legal for women to be topless in public—a law established in 1992, but one that police officers are periodically reminded of. In 2005, Jill Coccaro was detained for 12 hours after showing her breasts in the Lower East Side in New York, and successfully sued the city for $29,000. Around the country, there are other groups—not affiliated with Free the Nipple—fighting for gender equality in shirtlessness laws, too. Go Topless holds a “Go Topless” day every year in August in over 30 cities, where women do just that and chant, “Free your breasts. Free your minds.”

Topless warriors in Lina Esco’s Free The Nipple. Photo: Courtesy of Bérénice Eveno. Copyright Disruptive Films Inc.  

Free the Nipple has already had some success. It started a video campaign to get Facebook to allow women to show themselves breastfeeding—previously, those pictures were routinely removed for being overtly sexual. The video was called “Everybody’s Gotta Eat,” and showed mundane images people feeding themselves and each other, ending on a shot of a mother breastfeeding her child. The social media site agreed and said it would stop yanking breastfeeding shots. “”What we have done is modified the way we review reports of nudity to help us better examine the context of the photo or image,” a spokesperson for Facebook said at the time. “As a result of this, photos that show a nursing mother’s other breast will be allowed even if it is fully exposed.”

Esco says that she hopes the movie will continue to change the puritanical way we see women’s bodies—and lead to more significant changes like getting women wages that are equal to men’s—but admits that some people are still critical of what she’s doing. “They’re like, ‘There are bigger issues to talk about than you taking your top off,’” she says. “But if I don’t take my top off, there won’t be a discussion. If you believe that fighting for women’s rights isn’t important, then that’s your choice.”