Super Bowl: Nipple Gate Returns

Adam Levine

First, critics panned Maroon 5′s Super Bowl halftime performance. Then, reports The Associated Press, social media folks went full-on snark over Adam Levine’s throw pillow-like tank top design. Then he peeled off the busy brown shirt and the snark turned to outrage over his exposed nipples.

The bare-chested moment Sunday had some feminists and Janet Jackson supporters focused on how male and female nipples are treated differently in life, especially on network TV and by the NFL years after Jackson’s career was derailed by a split-second halftime reveal.

Jackson’s 2004 wardrobe malfunction, thanks to Justin Timberlake’s tug on her bodice, earned CBS a $550,000 Federal Communications Commission fine that was later voided by an appeals court. Levine’s nipples enjoyed far more stage time.

Janet Jackson

Kimberly Seals Allers, a journalist and breastfeeding advocate, wrote of the male-female double standard on public exposure of nipples in her 2017 book, “The Big Letdown: How Medicine, Big Business and Feminism Undermine Breastfeeding.” She was watching the game Sunday and joined the Twitter choir with some research she had done.

Public breastfeeding has become a flashpoint for controversy over exposure of female nipples, from the arrests of women who do it around the globe to restaurants who have banned it.

Allers said Monday by telephone that the Jackson controversy was the first thing she thought of when she watched Levine peel off his tank.

“The issue was around the nipple itself,” she said of the decades-old bans on topless men. “Clark Gable really did what was considered a very provocative thing in the movie by taking off his shirt and that was the first time,” she said. “Ever since then it became very commonplace, versus what happened to women, where their fight to not sexualize their breasts didn’t have the same success.”