Micol Hebron’s Male Nipple Pasties: Protesting Social Media Censorship and Gender Inequality

Los Angeles-based artist and art lecturer Micol Hebron initiated an art movement by creating functional male nipple pasties to protest the censorship of female presenting bodies on the internet. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook are notorious for deleting photographs containing the naked body, even if they are artworks. These social platform’s community policy & guidelines also specifically state that photographs containing “female nipples” will be deleted unless there are breastfeeding babies within the vicinity.

Hence, Hebron took photographs of cis-men’s nipples and created pasties out of them, both digital and physical. She then encouraged everyone affected by these policies, including cis-women, trans women and non-binary people, to take topless photographs wearing the pasties. This creates a movement of nude photographs without “female nipples” that are exempt from censorship. The act not only questions these specific social media policies but also questions the discrimination brought against the female presenting body. This is why Hebron's work is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality.

Hebron’s pasties invoke a sense of irony since it is impossible to tell if a pair of nipples belong to a specific gender. Nipples are gender-neutral, and yet social media’s policies choose to conveniently erase those that belong to people who are assigned female at birth (AFAB) or have medically transitioned. Hebron’s choice to share the male nipple pasties with the hashtags #freethenipple also ties the movement to an older one. ‘Free the Nipple’ is a body equality slogan popularized by the 2012 Lina Esco film, which followed a group of young women who exposed similar double standards and protested for equality in New York City.

Micol Hebron’s male nipple pasty project challenges the arbitrary and discriminatory censorship of female-presenting bodies—both cis and trans—on social media, highlighting the absurdity of policies that differentiate between male and female nipples. By creating and distributing male nipple pasties, Hebron cleverly exposes the double standards that exist in internet censorship and calls for greater equality in the way bodies are portrayed and regulated online. This art movement opens up critical conversations about body autonomy, representation and the need for more inclusive, non-discriminatory policies on digital platforms.

Find out more about male nipple pasties and other initiatives by Micol Hebron on her website www.micolhebron.artcodeinc.com or Instagram @unicornkiller1.