Instagram/caitlinjstasey69/emrata
As the internet-wide censorship of the female body rages on, as does the Free the Nipple campaign.
While public figures like Emily Ratajkowski and Caitlyn Stasey have jumped on board and offered their whole-hearted, full-bodied support of Free the Nipple, Instagram still insists on banning women for showing their breasts – while men are allowed to flash their nipples freely.
However, some clever, creative souls, like the folk at Genderless Nipple, are finding ingenious ways around the sexualisation and the resulting censorship – and managing to evidence the hypocrisy all at once.
Camila Gonzalez Corea, a 22-year-old Fine Art student of Central Saint Martins, is among the trail-blazers.
She started a new art project to point out the consistent, unrelenting and damaging sexualisation of the female nipple, and ‘protest against Instagram’s sexist terms of use’.
The project is called The Nipple Act and it asks women of all ages, shapes, creeds, and sizes to submit fully-nude pictures of their nipples, which Corea promises will adorn the Internet through her art – even if Instagram doesn’t like it.
The Costa Rican artist depicts female nipples in all their finery, using a modern take on the old-school technique, Pointillism, as adopted by the likes of Claude Monet.
The feminist cyber activism canvases capture the beauty of breasts, using a sneaky guise which becomes clear when you zoom in and look a little closer.
The compositions are entirely made up of emoji.
Due to Instagram’s strict censorship – powered by an algorithm that automatically deletes any show of female nipples – the emoji pictures sneak their way around the image-sharing platform’s barriers and their double standards.
Instagram will ‘prohibit all forms of nudity on Instagram because some audiences within our global community are particularly sensitive to this type of content’.
Despite remaining ‘committed to artistic freedom’, users are not permitted to post ‘nude, partially nude, pornographic or sexually suggestive’ photos on the service, whether in the name of art or not.
This particularly impacts women, breast-feeding mums, photographers and fashion houses, models, as well as artists who chose to depict the traditional subject matter of the female nude; something that has been around long before projected societal shame.
Camila posts her work, presumably pulling the *smug face* emoji, to ‘promote the normalisation and de-fetishisation of the female nipple’ – and she’s already had submissions from women aged 18 to 60-years-old.
You could talk all day about why it is wrong to censor female nipples – which have an inherent and important biological purpose – and not male nipples.
Instead, Corea – who understands better than most that a picture is worth a thousand words – has used the universal language of emoji to make her point.
*strong arm* *strong arm* *strong arm*
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.