Kim Kardashian rides again with another topless selfie. This time, her pants are on, and Emily Ratajkowski has joined her, and they’re flipping double birds at the haters in the bathroom.
It’s censored again because Instagram is a platform where boobs aren’t supposed to exist. But interestingly, a huge black band covers both of their chests. What it means to take a topless selfie: whatever it means to the woman doing it, and a whole bunch of other stuff to the people looking at her. What it means to take a nude selfie: stilllll, whatever it means to the woman doing it, and yet many other terrifying or liberating things to a whole bunch of people talking about her. But to censor the female body, is to make it obscene. A black bar, essentially ruins the photo. But it’s also that black bar that reminds you that women’s bodies are still being treated like they’re up for consumption.
Women have long fought for equal treatment for all breasteses and breakfastes. Instagram, as well as people who write anti-Kim Kardashian think pieces are familiar with treating her nudes with a special kind of individualized scorn because of her sex tape past. And Emily’s boobs have also been trivialized thanks to that good old music video Blurred Lines. Now, as Kim’s nude propels chatter about her even further, they’re back with double black bars.
A self-censored woman, who for better for worse, shares every titillating and sleep-inducing detail about her life, is a move for acceptance of a woman’s body, without the fears many well-intentioned people still have about a gal with her nips out. We do not need angry black bars on women’s chests. But paired with a middle finger in load defiance of everyone telling her to be ashamed, demure, to shut up, sit down, and wear a shirt, a black bar is a feminist power move.
