Women have a long and admirable history of doing battle with their breasts.
In 783 CE, Saxon women, including noblewoman Fastrada, famously hurled themselves bare-breasted into battle against Charlemagne's forces. Fastrada later became Charlemagne's third wife and Queen of the Franks.
In the Greenland saga, Viking woman Freydís Eiríksdóttir, half sister to Leif Erikson and eight months pregnant at the time, is said to have bared her breast and, striking it with her sword, let out a "furious cry" in an attempt to frighten off a group of attacking Native Americans. It worked.
Lady Godiva supposedly convinced her husband to lower the taxes of the medieval residents of Coventry by riding through the streets naked.
Marianne, the revered French symbol for liberty, is depicted bare-breasted in the famous painting by Eugène Delacroix, hoisting the Tricolour in one hand, a bayonet in the other, as she leads the people over bodies of the fallen.
Perhaps it is not entirely a surprise, then, that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is so determined to remove topless panhandlers from Times Square: History (and myth) clearly tells us topless women are dangerous. Naked breasts are simply unregistered weapons that at any moment can be unholstered and directed at innocent passersby. In this case, the hordes of tourists mobbing NYC's streets.
Or you'd be forgiven for thinking so based on the wildly over-the-top reaction of NYC politicians when confronted with naked nipples.
Some quick backstory in case you missed it:
Among the many panhandlers and street performers jockeying for tourist money in Times Square are a handful of enterprising topless women—they call themselves desnudas, the Spanish word for "naked"—who are painting their (legally) bared breasts a patriotic red, white, and blue and offering to pose with tourists for cash. Last week, during the doggiest days of summer, the New York Daily News (full disclosure: I write for the NYDN from time to time) did what tabloids do when the well is running dry, and took an old, innocuous story—these women have been doing this for years now—and went on a four-day rampage. (This par for the course where NYC tabloids are concerned: Last month the New York Post beat a similar editorial warpath about a homeless man who was caught urinating in public.)
Mayor de Blasio, who presumably does have things to do in August, took note and rushed together a blue-ribbon committee to deal with this plague of terrifying topless women, going so far as to threaten to turn Times Square from a pedestrian plaza back into a thoroughfare for cars.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a wonderfully scathing op-ed blasting the mayor for his overreaction and noting that "being shirtless in the city is perfectly legal, a privilege men have enjoyed since forever. ... Times Square is not going to hell, or anywhere near hell's vicinity." On Sunday, dozens of topless women marched in support. (The last time an NYC mayor got this up in arms about a bare breast was 1999, when then Mayor Giuliani was handed an article by, you guessed it, the NYDN about a Chris Ofili painting exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum that depicts the Virgin Mary with a bare breast made from elephant dung; Giuliani wasted no time in cutting the museum's $7 million in public funding, a decision that was later overturned in court.)
In a country where we seem unable to enact any sort of meaningful gun laws, despite continually witnessing terrible proof of their necessity, how is it that the simple appearance of bare breasts can inspire a response that one imagines should be reserved for actual weapons?
Perhaps the truth is men view breasts as a weapon of sorts—at least insofar as they signify a woman's power over her own body. Culturally, there has long been a determination to keep them holstered in one way or another, from dress codes to topless prohibitions on beaches. It's worth noting among all the joking over political overreaction that de Blasio is not alone in his fear of the nipple. Even some of the more progressive companies in America take care not to offend when it comes to this region of a woman's body: Facebook and Instagram have long supported a contentious policy of banning women's nipples from their images. Reportedly, more than 200,000 viewers complained the FCC after Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Super Bowl; later Viacom agreed to pay $3.5 million to the FCC in fines.
It seems we are fine with breasts as long as they are constricted, contained, and nicely covered up―or at least, on display only in a manner that is pleasing and related to sex. Even a cursory glance around the many billboards of Times Square reveals no shortage of breasts in the line of sight of these tourists the mayor is so concerned about. But those breasts are sexualized in a way that makes men feel comfortable.
As any woman who's had to deal with sideways glances when she breastfed in public can tell you, we are, as a society, a great deal less comfortable with breasts when they are performing functional, nonsexualized duties. We are even more disturbed when they don't belong to young women and/or don't appear round and full. (Maybe only Victoria's Secret models have the right to take their tops off?) Women are guilty of this thinking, too, and it's no surprise when you consider that for most of our lives, the only images we see in films, magazines, and on television depict a certain ideal.
What is the solution? As movements like Free the Nipple suggest, a generation of younger women is increasingly fed up with being bound up. Our bodies have functions beyond those geared toward sexual pleasure, and it's time they're recognized as such.
But where men's eyes (and desires) go, so does government policy. If we are in fact waging a war over our breasts, with our breasts, perhaps it doesn't hurt to have a few more ladies' nipples in the arsenal