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alt title(s): Nippled And Dimed
Know it. Fear it.
It's the thing that (almost) guarantees an R rating from the MPAA. It might've cost you $550,000 if you show it at half-time during the Super Bowl. The sight of it is so Harmful To Minors, with their delicate psyches , that you must click a release to see it on the Internet. The United States Supreme Court upheld an ordinance requiring strippers to cover it under a pastie.
It's the progenitor of numerous tropes, from Censor Steam to Godiva Hair, to Modesty Bedsheet, to Modesty Towel, to Peek A Boo, to Naked In Mink.
It's the female nipple.
According to The Other Wiki, in its most general form, a nipple is an appurtenance from which a fluid emanates. In the anatomical sense, this fluid is breast milk used to nurture a mammal species' young. Contrary to popular belief, male nipples are not fully vestigial, and indeed male lactation is possible under certain circumstances. Generally, though, this is a role assumed by females. Also, their general sensitivity gives them a role in sexual foreplay.
Also, if you show them before Watershed or Safe Harbor, Moral Guardians will freak out.
Why this should necessarily be the case is a topic more suited for a dissertation by a Women's Studies doctoral student rather than this wiki.
Generally, the stated reason seems to be, though, that the female breast is primarily viewed as sexual and arousing in nature when exposed, whereas the male breast is not. Of course, what exposure counts as indecent is a product of a society's mindset more than any underlying human cause. After all, different cultures certainly have different nudity taboos (as the Innocent Fanservice Girl can attest), and one sometimes gets the feeling in the United States that other countries are laughing at the prudery behind our backs (WE certainly are). This works the other way round too: In the western world, a woman can show her legs without legal problems, but in some other cultures this is as taboo as the nipple is for the US (which means we get to laugh behind the backs of countries laughing behind our backs, thank goodness the planet is round).
That being said, there seems to be something special about the female nipple in and of itself. There has to be a reason why there's so much Anime Anatomy out there, why it's PG-13 to have a fully-naked-but-nipple-less Angelina Jolie in Beowulf, why Barbie is made so clearly inhuman (you know, apart from the Stepford Smiler thing), and why Playboy is kept behind the counter when Maxim is not. There just seems to be some kind of Moral Dissonance to be able to watch medical shows featuring uncensored gory operations and autopsies, but where female patients' nipples are blurred. Perhaps, as the Theiss Titillation Theory would imply, the very fact that they are so often obscured has fetishized the body part as innately sexual. That's one for the discussion page, ladies and gents.
In any case, it's probably the current best example of the Double Standard, owing to the fact that women lack penises. It is also worth mentioning this seems to be largely a US phenomenon; More conservative countries will be more restrictive with nudity all around, while in most of Europe and Canada nipples are no big deal. It is certainly rare to find anyone who believes it harmful to children. See also Thong Of Shielding.
It's also an attitude held strongly in the United Kingdom, but strangely for a nation considered uptight and prudish, not quite as big a deal is made about small accidents when a nipple shows accidentally for about a second. You sure couldn't sue somebody $50,000 for it. After 9PM the UK deems nipples to cease being offensive, since good little boys and girls are all asleep by then. Mind you, when a popular newspaper there, The Sun, is well-known for having a topless woman on page 3 every issue, and as far as this troper is aware, there are no restrictions on selling it to children... well... let's just say that any child who wanted to see it wouldn't have too much trouble.
Also, (as I believe it's required at this point): BOOBIES!!!!!!!.
Examples
Advertising
- A recent ad for Nando's chicken in Australia had a topless woman lying in bed face down, with a portion of her areola clearly visible. Funny, haven't seen that ad for a while...
- There is an ad for Air New Zealand in which the gimmick is that actors pretending to be airline staff walk around wearing body paint instead of uniforms. It is probably not a coincidence that while some male nipples are visible, objects on a trolley block the sight of the stewardess' nipples.
- An ice cream ad from Thailand had an ice cream scoop scoop out what was clearly the shape of a naked woman—nipples and all. It quickly got banned.
- This is actually more common than most people notice (just usually it is not quite so blatantly obvious). Breast are among the shapes that advertising companies try to make people subconsciously recognize something in their adds as. Pay close attention to ads for things like vodka. This Troper remembers one magazine ad that the ice in the glass had a resemblance to the female anatomy but not enough for certain people to notice.
Anime and Manga
- Miss Mune-Mune from Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai is all over this trope. Several times, one more revealing than the other.
- The original Japanese OP for Brain Powerd is all about this, although the series contains very little nudity.
- Anko in Naruto wears a fishnet top. Apparently she has no nipples.
- Same deal for Mahou Sensei Negima. Due to the incredible amounts of Clothing Damage, this has practically become one of Ken Akamatsu's stylistic signatures. Although he has an excuse, as the magazine that published Negima wouldn't allow nipples to be shown. They're okay now, but it would be weird if everybody suddenly gained nipples halfway through the manga.
- As though celebrating its move to a magazine with presumably laxer censorship guidelines, Episode 0 of Mahou Senki Lyrical Nanoha Force has a brief nipple shot of new character Lily. Note that the supplementary manga for previous seasons, which were released in another magazine, used Anime Anatomy all the way.
- Ranma ½ has no qualms against displaying nipples, and not just on the gender-changing Ranma.
Film
- As mentioned above, female nipples almost always guarantee an R rating, but exceptions can be made when non-sexual nudity is somewhat justified (bathing, medical procedures, cultural norms, etc.). Some examples:
- The movie The Beastmaster has a long gratuitous shot of Tanya Roberts topless. Rated PG.
- Ditto the movie Sheena.
- Airplane! has a random gratuitous breast shot. Rated PG.
- The movie Titanic also shows Kate Winslet topless. Rated PG-13. Apparently, James Cameron and the film's editors worked with the MPAA editing this scene; they were able to get the lower rating because they kept the shots down to a certain amount of seconds.
- The James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, rated PG in the United Kingdom, has quite a few Page Three Stunna pictures openly visible in one scene.
- Sixteen Candles is rated PG, and, to quote Jay and Silent Bob's review of it: "Not bad — it's got tits in it, but no bush.''
- The 1968 Romeo And Juliet shows breasts after Peek A Boos and Modesty Bedsheets appeared to be used. Especially notable as the actress was only 15 at the time — supposedly, she wasn't allowed to attend the premiere because she was too young to be allowed to see herself topless. It was originally rated G, then changed to PG once the rating existed. It's actually illegal to show the nude scene in U.S. high school English classes because of the laws on child pornography.
- Not that it still doesn't happen...
- This troper can personally attest that it does happen on occasion.
- The Fatal Fury movie never showed any animated nipples, even in the shower scenes — unless you, the viewer, spent some quality time with the Pause button during Mai's fight scenes.
- The Hitman film of the game had its female lead going topless in a few scenes. In notoriously strict Singapore, it only got an NC16 rating. For reference, the city-state also has an M18 and R21 rating, where the number next to it denotes the minimum age.
- This also happens in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with a background stripper; the last shot of the scene was a close up of her pastie-clad assets via a mirror-tiled wall. This movie is rated PG in the United Kingdom.
- The Sci-Fi classic Logan's Run was rated PG and featured a scene with a woman undressing at a distance.
- Virtually the entire second half of the 1984 Mel Gibson movie The Bounty features a topless island girl standing behind one of the main characters. It was rated PG.
- Across The Universe is a rare example of this from recent years.
- The PG movie version of Ragtime has a fair amount of nudity from Evelyn Nesbit.
- Discussions about Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones, particularly on the Web, often mentioned that the tight white top worn by Natalie Portman showed the shape of her nipples, regardless of the lack of any nudity.
- Referenced in the Eddie Murphy film Boomerang where an advertisement for a perfume commercial (featuring a character played by Grace Jones) is being edited and the main characters go to great lengths to figure out whether a shot of her bare chest features a nipple. Eddie Murphy's character insists it's just a shadow. Eventually, the editor does a close-up and declares "It's a nipple, 'cause I'm drooling".
- Scrooged had a Solid Gold Dancer in the Show Within A Show live Christmas special, whose areolas were "just barely" visible over her neckline— "And these guys are really looking!"
- The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) has an entire beginning sequence about a village of bushmen in the Kalahari desert. As a basically undiscovered tribal village with their own customs and language, they frequently show topless women going about their daily duties, in a completely nonsexual manner. The movie is rated PG.
- Clash of the Titans shows a woman near the beginning breast-feeding a baby, but she has two nipples and one one-mouthed child, leaving the other nipple exposed for several seconds; and, near the end of the film, Andromeda's breasts are seen from the side as she exists a ritual bath.
- Bram Stoker's Dracula has Dracula's brides topless when they molest Keanu...err...Jonathan Harker. But they get tops on in the broadcast TV version. It is also noticeable that there are five major female characters in this movie, the three brides, Lucy, and Mina. Of these, only Mina doesn't have a topless scene (she does have a transparent nightgown scene, though), incidentally, the only one played by an American actress.
- In The Last Unicorn the harpy has not two, but three breasts, and all three nipples can be clearly seen.
Literature
- Lampshaded in Kitty Goes to Washington, where a female werewolf is forced to stay in a cage on live television during the night of a full moon. She gets an FCC fine for the few frames between fully clothed human and fully furred wolf while trying to save her t-shirt.
Live Action TV
- Like the Kirikou movie, Roots and Shaka Zulu featured African women walking around top-free in a completely desexualized atmosphere. They were also made in 1977 and 1986, respectively.
- In its first episode, Mad Men features a stripper, who ends up taking her bra off — to reveal pastie-clad breasts.
- In a particularly Squicky subversion, the second-season episode of CSI, "Slaves of Las Vegas," goes to great lengths to position a naked female body just so, so that her limbs cover her bits appropriately when she's found buried in a sandbox. Then, when it's time for the autopsy, no attempt is made to hide her nipples or derriere, and then the show one-ups itself by doing a TMI Cam into the breast via the nipple to show the saline implants.
- Related: Jeannie from I Dream Of Jeannie didn't had a navel, or more accurately, featured a pastie-clad navel. Apparently, navels were pornographic back then.
- Parodied in Arrested Development, when Kitty flashes Michael to make a point, and a censor cloud comes up over her nipples. Then Tobias flashes Michael because...he's Tobias...and the same censor cloud comes up.
- This is one of the various topics that Bill Maher was talking about when he was defending France from the likes of Conservative American Politicians. When Bill was going over the good parts about what France has over America (let alone in general) he mentions on Nude Beaches are much more accepted in France than in the US and in his words "Because they are not a nation of 6 year olds whom scream and giggle at pee pee parts!"
Music Videos
- R.E.M.'s 'Pop Song 89' music video features three pairs of nipples: those of singer Michael Stipe and those of two female dancers (a third dancer appears to be wearing pasties). This is probably an attempt at subverting the Double Standard. Significantly, Stipe becomes a backing dancer himself at the end of the video, while the women take turns in the foreground.
- And when the Moral Guardians complained, R.E.M. stuck black bars over every set of nipples in the video, saying that a nipple was a nipple and they got rid of all of them.
- Duran Duran's "Girls on Film". 'Nuff said
Video Games
- The MMORPG Age of Conan apparently has visible nipples on undressed female characters by default (though they retain permanent undies), with the option to hide them appropriately called the "Prude mode" or something to that effect. At the same time, modders who have changed texture files to enable them to go bottomless have found that Funcom will almost immediately issue a tweak so that it will no longer work.
- Bethesda Softworks found themselves in the middle of a minor controversy when a fan-made mod was released for Oblivion, which removed the default underwear tops for female characters and revealed their blurry but anatomically correct upper bodies. Probably in response to this, Bethesda has delayed the release of modding tools for Fallout 3 until after the holiday buying season (which is far from making the game impossible to mod, which is why it's known that, yes, they also removed the "details" from the female body texture.)
- The Grand Theft Auto games include strip clubs with dancers who never expose anything "indecent". This in a game depicting a wide variety of destructive and violent acts.
- The Witcher in three of five chapters has an NPC you can interact with (and even have sex) that is completely naked, but predictably she is censored in the US release of the game.
Webcomics
Web Original
Western Animation
- In Kirikou and the Sorceress, all of the women are shirtless just like the men and no one makes a big deal about it. It helps that it was set in ancient Africa and that it was made in France, of course. Interestingly, it is classified as a family movie and won awards for children's movies in Europe, but couldn't be aired outside premium cable in America.
- Not only that, but the main character is an infant boy walking around in his birthday suit with the penis in plain view.
- It won awards for children's movies in America, too (Chicago International Children's Film Festival).
- In Africa, there's no nipple taboo indeed. Instead, a woman showing her legs is considered immodest. Note that all the women wear long skirts.
- In the Aeon Flux shorts featured on Liquid Television and in the 30-minute episodes alike, male nipples are twisted, suckled and toyed with in other sexual manners but it was Aeon's Stripperiffic costume that was the most problematic there.
- The PG-13 Triplettes de Belleville featured an animated version of Josephine Baker, a black entertainer in the 1920s whose costume consisted of little more than a skirt made of bananas◊.
- In an episode of Ren And Stimpy where they switch places with a couple of babies. The Faceless parents fall for the Paper Thin Disguise and eventually take a bath with them. The mother's whole boob is visible in several shots during the bathtub scene.
- Danish Childrens cartoon series Thomas & Tim had the pervert member of the titular duo grope a topless mermaid, with nipples fully visible, in one episode. There was a comment from a concerned parent on this episode in a newspaper during a later rerun, but the issue was about the mermaid not rejecting said groping any more forcefully than slapping the guy's hand away and expressing mild annoyance with his actions, not anything about how dangerous it is for the kiddies to see nipples. The series was intended for kids aged 4 and up, and aired following Sesame Street and similiar shows. Denmark is cool.
Real Life
- Women must cover up to take part in martial arts in which the competitors are traditionally 'shirtless' even when they have ample chest flesh such as Sumo.
- Bodybuilding competitions where, due to the contestants having single-digit-percent body-fat, any difference in chest mass caused by estrogen and fat deposits is minimized, yet the women still have to wear tops to differentiate the sexes.
- Most modern female bodybuilders ingest male hormones as well, which causes them to look like men in every way— including facially and genitally. Breasts are typically the first thing to shrink; tops are worn for regulation.
- In a real life subversion, women are legally able to go topless in Columbus, Ohio. You don't see many of them actually do it except at the annual
Gay Pride festival (loads of lesbian boobies) Community Festival (aka Com Fest, which every year before the Fest, puts a warning on its website about not annoying the topless women) but the option is available.
- Same in Eugene, Oregon. The law is vague, however, and so whether or not women have to wear pasties depends on which officer drives by.
- This is somewhat more universal than you might think. In the wake of several discrimination suits (men being allowed to be shirtless when women aren't), the default is that you have to specify nipples as obscenity rather than them being banned by default. In Columbus's case (I lived right down the road in Newark, which went under the same laws), the obscenity law states that it is genitals which are obscene. Of course, like barefoot driving, not all police officers know the law, and you can still be cited for causing a disturbance in certain circumstances.
- Women are legally permitted to go topless on private property, such as one's front yard, in the province of Ontario.
- Women in New York are permitted to go topless inside a windowed living-space, as long as they are simply engaged in ordinary living-behavior; this law was exploited by an entrepreneuring web-site owner, who constructed a see-through motorhome and hired three nude women to engage in "ordinary living-behavior" including using the see-through bathroom.
- Technically, all of Canada allows top-freedom. There's a basic law in the Canadian Constitution that guarantees equal rights between men and women. Granted, no female has ever tried going topless in public in Canada to test this law, but the loophole remains. Though it makes one wonder why there isn't a gender equality law in the U.S.'s constitution... Hmm...
- Don't open that can of worms. Wait another ten years before giving the ERA another shot.
- Lil' Kim's infamous "dress" for the 1999 MTV Music Awards, which exposed all of her breast except for a small nipple covering to keep it legal.
- An unusual - and telling - case is Thomas Beatie, the famous "pregnant man," a transman who carried a child to term - his nipples, female in any meaningful physical sense, are a frequent sight on even daytime network television above his pregnant belly.
- An example this troper found particularly humourous is the results of plastic surgery on a transexual woman on a medical show. The before shots were "male" nipples uncensored, but following breast augmentation the "female" nipples were censored. They showed much of the swell of breast and the only part censored was the nipples which hadn't actually changed. That we had already seen.
- In Sweden a public pool had charges pressed against them for gender discrimination after two young women were forbidden to swim topless. A big debate followed, since the two women claimed that there is no difference between a male and a female breast, and many people disagree since female breasts are generally more sexual. The court found in the plaintiffs' favor, and this practice is now discrimination in Sweden by legal precedent.
Tv Tropes
- The minor Edit War over the appropriateness of including the humorously-captioned and non-prurient Wikimedia Commons image of a nipple on this page about nipples, has turned this page into a Self Demonstrating Article.
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