Look, I’m down. I like the female nipple as much as the next hetero guy. But by all accounts, or maybe just because we’ve come to the end of it, the #freethenipple movement seems to have reached a watershed in 2022.

We had Doja Cat baring gold-plated Schiaparelli nipples at the Billboard Music Awards, Kendall Jenner showing off on the Met Ball stairs, and Florence Pugh revealing nipple in Rome through a pink Valentino. Victoria De Angelis hit the VMAs in a Gucci bodysuit, one breast exposed sporting a heart-shaped pasty, Bella Thorne attended a screening of the film Morbius in a Sergio Castaño Peña gown, surely showing lots of her attributes, and Olivia Wilde wore a sheer Alexandre Vauthier at the Academy Museum Gala.

What a year, huh?

It seems this “Free the Nipples” stuff started in 2012, during pre-production on a documentary bearing the same name as the movement. This full-length U.S. film illuminated viewers on “the inequality of the legislation on torso nudity,” of which I surely was not aware there was this inequality, and the movement spread globally from this point.

Ladies began to strip and expose across the world, with more than 200 ladies and men marching shirtless on a beach in the UK, topless activists arrested for indecent exposure during a Bernie Sanders campaign, and the French breastfeeding awareness campaign COPAM amping up their support of mothers feeding children naturally in public. Hey, great, I say. Let the nipples free.

My only takeaway from all of this mammary bruhaha, is…what’s the big deal? We all have nipples, guys as well as girls, mammals in general. Surely, we see more breast-flesh real estate in modern-day music video “drops” or on any of the many “Real Housewives Of”… shows, when nipple and even areola aren’t exposed.

I have held the opinion for years that the nipple, the dent of the booty, and the head of a penis, scare censors, theologians, and just the sexually uninitiated because these parts of the body have the connotation of secretion (nipples=milk, crack of the ass then anus=poopie, penis heads=ejaculate or the worst of all…pee) and we simply can’t offer even a hint of this possibility, of that which makes us human/animals. A body is fine to look at, but don’t dare hint at its smells, or stickiness!

So, we keep the nipples, ass-crack, penis under wraps…or so it seems to have been until this year. Maybe we are on to a better and brighter world?   

Nah….