For time immemorial, the Dub has gathered with friends from around campus to take off our shirts, bare our chests, and eat delicious home cooked spaghetti. Despite how it may appear, this is not just for shits and giggles, or purely for the sake of tradition. In essence, shirtless spaghetti is about making space for bodies that are not allowed or accepted to be topless in public. Public shirtless-ness has been reserved for cis male bodies, and only those that fit into normative beauty standards of whiteness, thinness, and masculinity.

The #FreeTheNip social media movement was started in 2014 by filmmaker Lisa Esco, with the release of a movie about a group of women who protest for the ability to be topless in public. For Esco, it was about women having choices and control over their bodies. She argues that bare breasts are usually reserved for porn or strip clubs, where they are sexualized and paid to be seen. This specific movement has mostly been on social media and in public, focusing on protesting bans on women’s nipples. While #FreeTheNip has succeeded in drawing attention to the censorship of nipples, the nipples portrayed are those of skinny, white, able-bodied, cis women. These bodies are (for the most part) accepted because they are conventionally attractive. If someone who deviates from this beauty standard goes topless, they meet aggressive backlash rather than cheers. If #FreeTheNip doesn’t actively advocate for the freeing of all nips, it is continuing to reinforce valuing bodies based on patriarchal standards. All chests—queer, trans, fat, racialized, hairy, old, scarred, nippleless, etc.— need to be given the choice to be naked, clothed, decorated or shown off. A key tenant of the feminism I aspire to is intersectionality: an awareness of the ways that different parts of our identity interact to create a unique combination of privilege and marginalization. If a movement is not intersectional, it’s upholding the structures it claims to be resisting.

The central idea of the #FreeTheNip movement resonates with Shirtless Spaghetti’s goal to provide a space for bare chests that are not accepted in public. I personally love this event. Aside from drawing attention to the unequal treatment of different nipples, it helps me to understand my own nudity outside of a sexual context. Because breasts are typically only shown in porn or sexualized content, and because I am typically only topless when I’m alone or having sex, I have been trained to understand my naked body as needing to be either sexual or hidden. Doing something very normal, like eating spaghetti, without a shirt on, has been one step in reframing how I think about my body and my boobs. This has also helped me to change how I value my body. Because of the association of nudity with sex, I felt like the goal of nudity, and the goal of my body in general, was to fit into certain standards of ‘sexy.’ Being naked or shirtless in different situations helps me to see nudity outside of sex, and to understand that my body is more than sexual. Being naked can be fun, thought provoking, easy, chilly, challenging, and (spaghetti) saucy.