School of Fontainebleau: Presumed Portrait of Gabrielle d'Estrées
and Her Sister the Duchess of Villars (c. 1594)
Oil on canvas (96 x 125 cm)
The female nipple is a small, anatomical structure designed primarily to secrete breast milk into the mouths of babes and sucklings. But it is also considered an erogenous zone; i.e., a part of the body highly sensitive to sexual stimulation.
It wasn't surprising, therefore, when a 2006 survey discovered that a large majority of young women said their level of arousal was significantly enhanced by having their nipples fondled, kissed, licked, sucked, bitten, or clamped. Indeed, some respondents claimed to experience orgasm directly from nipple play alone.
Female nipples are thus subject to both fetishistic fascination and rules governing modesty and so-called indecent exposure. On social media sites such as Instagram, for example, they remain taboo and subject to strict censorship, whatever the context in which they appear and regardless of whether they're erect or not.
Amusingly, a gender-equality campaign called Free the Nipple was launched in 2012, inspired by feminist filmmaker Lina Esco, to challenge this policing of and discrimination against female bodies. However, I regret to report that the latest predicted trend in cosmetic surgery is to do away with rather than liberate the poor nipple. At any rate, more and more women are apparently requesting ever smaller, Smartie-sized nipples.
For in this world today, where a shrinking number of modern women choose to breed and where, amongst those who do, there's an increasing reluctance to breastfeed, there's really no bio-functional point in having embarrassingly large or ugly-looking nipples - even if there remains a lingering, rather nostalgic, erotic justification for holding on to them for just a little while longer ...
Notes
To watch the official trailer to Lina Esco's film, Free the Nipple (2014), on IMDb, click here.
For a related post to this one in which I develop the above ideas, click here.
