The fastest way to upset as many people as possible in 2014 involved a pretty simple game plan. First, you had to be a woman; second, you had to explicitly refer to or reveal a part of your body in public. Rihanna dared to have nipples and got chucked off Instagram for an (incredibly boring) six months. FKA Twigs dared to have thighs and had all mention of them edited out of all the radio plays and even post-watershed televised performances of her single “Two Weeks”. Then at the start of 2015, Rita Ora dared to have cleavage at 7pm, and over 400 people were upset enough to officially complain.

Women, one may have noticed, have had bodies for ages, and people have been upset by them for just as long. What has felt potent about their presence in the world of pop in the past 12 months, was the way they women were ready to fight back against the male gaze that dominated pop culture in 2013 and pretty much every year before that. There was an increasing sense of the female body being used as a fuck-you rather than a fuck-me: see, exhibit one, Nicki Minaj wielding an AK47 directly at said male gaze.

Outside of the realm of major music videos, Rihanna, Miley Cyrus and Madonna all used their (and other women’s) bodies to wage a war against censors on platforms that are arguably just as influential in today’s pop cultural landscape: Instagram. Rihanna, as well as sharing her own topless magazine cover, showed support for Scout Willis’s weaponised areolae by retweeting

her semi-nude walk around New York

. Madonna bit back at Instagram’s “

hypocrisy

” after they deleted

an image

that showed a model’s nipple from her account. Meanwhile, Miley has begun promoting the #FreeTheNipple hashtag with a vigour she usually reserves for pizza and weed, after having a photo showing her nips taken down in December.

FreeTheNipple is a New York-based movement fighting for women to have the right to be topless in public - whilst legal in some states, many women are arrested even so if they’re seen with their baps out - and on platforms like Instagram. There’s a tangled discussion to be had at the heart of this issue about how you can protest against the male gaze while also inviting it (see: the overwhelming support of #FreeTheNipple from creepy dudes), but their overall aim is something I think we can all get on board with: “a more balanced system of censorship, and legal rights for all women to breastfeed in public.”

I fully support @Scout_Willis and her conquest against @instagram #FreeTheNipple.. those are some great boobs! keep on rockin

— Alexander Banksy (@DOPE_MusicBlog) May 28, 2014

What the activists behind #FreeTheNipple are really asking us to confront, rather than our feelings about seeing a boob on the loose while we’re grocery shopping, is the question of why boobs are, according to censors, among one of the most offensive things we can see. Miley is casting light on this with her deeply uncomfortable recent Instagram posts in which she’s been Photoshopping her own head as a prepubescent child onto (censored) nude female bodies. The implication is that Instagram are cool with the sexualisation of children, as long as there isn’t a nipple shown. Here’s a child’s head on a topless woman’s body, but it’s totes fine with Instagram, because there’s black tape over the offending nips. A breastfeeding woman, though? No fucking way. Instagram would literally rather seeing a baby with boobs than a baby being fed by boobs.

Blanket bans on female body parts just don’t work as an effective mode of censorship; and it’s even worse when sexist value judgements come into play. I can’t be the only one who feels that it’s shady to allow J-Lo to repeat the word “booty” ad infinitum on the radio in the context of “dance up on that man because he wants you to,” when Twigs isn’t allowed to sing the way less explicit “thighs” in the context of “get between my thighs because I want you to.”

In 2015, let’s make it all about context. Take Bang Radio, who set an awesome precedent in censorship last year by chopping Jay Z’s verse out of “Drunk In Love” on the basis that “The lyrics [“Eat the cake, Anna Mae”] controversially imitate a scene of severe domestic violence,” adding, “We believe in the unity of women and music and in no way condone violence, domestic or otherwise.” Bang Radio have basically got it bang on because they’re prioritising keeping their airwaves free of hateful attitudes rather than just blindly filtering out the naughty bits. Radio 1 followed suit, while other stations like Capital left that bit in, while bleeping the line "can't I keep my fingers off it, baby" because of the faintest suggestion of female masturbation.

Speaking to the FADER last year, #FreeTheNipple founder Lina Esco said: “It’s amazing when you talk to these young people, [who are] 17 or 18 years old, and they get it instantly. When you start talking to the older generation, people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, they just fight you…My generation and younger, they’re all for this. It’s the old system still trying to live and continue this mentality.” But wait a minute - isn’t it those younger generations who really have the control today? Young companies run by young people (hello Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) can really have an impact here that can topple the hypocrisy of an old media that lets women appear topless in family newspapers but won’t let a speaking, acting woman show cleavage on evening television.

Since October 2014, the government and the BBFC have been piloting a censorship scheme designed to protect kids from watching raunchy music videos online, because, as David Cameron put it, “bringing up children in an internet age, you are endlessly worried about what they are going to find online.” But that’s just the point: in an internet age, you can’t just stop your kids from ever seeing a nipple. They have Google. What you can do is use top-down censorship to foster the right values, dictating who gets to expose, describe and ogle women’s bodies in public. Let’s drop the old mentality that boobs = bad, and start looking at boobs in their wider context - that is, you know, attached to sentient women, who might just have their own opinions on them.

On the 15th January, Aimee Cliff will be a panelist at the London Short Film Festival’s Discussion about female sexuality in music videos. For more information and to book tickets click here.