In a world where the genitalia of millions of women are mutilated every year to discourage premarital sex, the double standard that men can be topless where women can’t—on beaches, television, and Instagram—seems a mild injustice.
But in many Western countries, that injustice has sparked a popular movement called Free the Nipple, with celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Cara Delevingne raising awareness on social media about breast censorship and the greater issue of gender inequality.
Now, a new film reimagines the online movement as an army of female revolutionaries fighting police and the patriarchy for the right to unfurl their breasts on America's streets, subways, and social media sites.
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Out today, Free the Nipple tells the story of a young, relentlessly earnest female journalist, With (Lina Esco), whose reporting on women protesting topless in New York City leads her to cross the line from journalistic observer to equal rights crusader. With is enchanted by Liv (Lola Kirke, sister of Girls star Jemima), a feminist activist who provides an insider’s view of the cause and the obstacles she faces even in liberal New York City, where it has been legal for a woman to be topless in public since 1992.
With presumes that the liberated nipple story will be her Watergate, making her career as a scribbler. As she types feverishly on the floor of her apartment, we see a montage of news clips—the mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater during a showing of The Dark Knight Rises, Janet Jackson’s infamous Super Bowl nip-slip—exposing a culture where sex is stigmatized more than violence. Why is it okay to show so much blood and gore on TV and in Hollywood movies, but ban images of barely bare-breasted women breastfeeding on Instagram?
It’s a good question, but when With submits her passion project to her boss at News Corp—the stereotypical grey-haired dinosaur in a suit who just doesn't get it—he looks down his long nose and thrusts the hard copy in her face. “If you’re in this to change the world, you’re in the wrong business,” he says before showing her the door, in one of the movie’s many ham-handed and clichéd scenes.
Of course With wants to change the world, so she becomes a feminist activist, galvanizing a troop of women to take the movement national and break free from their shackles (in this case, their bras).
“The nipple has become the Trojan Horse for a bigger dialogue to begin about inequality and oppression,” says the 29-year-old Esco, an actress who, like her character, is passionate, relentlessly earnest (it’s more endearing in real life), and who paused her career to focus on activism. (Free the Nipple is Esco’s directorial debut).
Indeed, it was Esco who introduced the movement to celebrities, writing about it in the Huffington Post. Days after her editorial was published, Miley Cyrus tweeted a picture of herself with a fake nipple over her eye to @freethenipple. (Cyrus and Esco met while working together on the 2012 film LOL).
“It was 2010 and we were on set in Detroit and I had this dream about topless women running around Wall Street in New York City, and I wanted to flesh that out,” says Esco. When she told LOL director Lisa Azuelos that she wanted to make a film about “women challenging censorship laws by going topless for equality,” Azuelos gave her $1 million to finance it. “I thought she was kidding!”
Esco describes her film as “life imitating art, or art imitating life,” and with few exceptions, Free the Nipple mirrors the processes of making the film and marketing the movement. In the film, after News Corp declines to publish her story, With holes up in Liv’s apartment and dives into building and promoting the movement. In real life, Esco and writer Hunter Richards “didn’t leave the house sometimes for five days straight, we didn’t have any money at times,” she says. “I was investing my whole life in this. You’re in this place as an artist where you don’t care if you lose an arm.”
The girls are frequently cash-strapped in the movie, too, and are frequently bailed out by With’s mentor in media. He writes them checks, gives them advice, and gets them press (he arranges a showing of With’s movie for all of his “top blogger” friends).
“We dealt with so many problems when we were shooting in New York, like trying to shoot during Hurricane Sandy,” says Esco. “And then our investors didn’t have enough money for us to shoot our ending in [Washington] DC, so while we were shooting through Sandy, Hunter was rewriting a different ending in the script. Winston Churchill said it best: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ And I felt like I just had to keep going.”
Much like her character, Esco frequently quotes influential people and launches into potted history lessons. She tells me that it has been legal for men to be topless in public in New York since 1936, thanks to four men from Coney Island who fought to overturn the law forbidding it. “Men aren’t constantly walking around topless, but they have that right, and women should have it too,” she says, noting that it is illegal for a woman to be topless (“even breastfeeding”) in public in 37 states.
“It’s almost 2015 and women are still getting paid 78 cents for every dollar a man makes. A majority of films in Hollywood are written and directed by men. But the Free the Nipple movement needs men, and the men of my generation are all for this cause. It’s the old system that isn’t. Just like Albert Einstein said, ‘We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.’”
The film’s climactic scene features With finally doffing her top (even as leader of the movement, she was too embarrassed to liberate her breasts) and running through Times Square while Liv films. “I grew up Catholic, and even though I’m not religious, that was the first time I’ve ever done anything like that and I went through the same feelings of deliberation and freedom as my character,” says Esco.
But this ends up being the film’s biggest problem: there isn’t enough of a distinction between life and art to make it entirely entertaining. Esco’s enthusiasm for the movement is endearing, her dedication to gender injustice inspiring (mild as the toplessness double standard may seem, it’s symptomatic of a larger fight for equality.) But neither one translates on screen in Free the Nipple, which often feels like a well-produced student film.
It may come from a heartfelt, well-informed place, but the film’s bouncing, bare breasts will likely be no match for Instagram’s censorship policies.
