The Motion Picture Association of America has deemed the following Sin City: A Dame to Kill For poster unacceptable for public advertising due to “nudity — curve of under breast and dark nipple/areola circle visible through sheer gown.”

Language like this from the MPAA drives me-and many others-crazy, never more than when it relates to female bodies in popular culture. The MPAA has no comprehensive understanding of how to handle sex, nudity and human relationships, and relies on arbitrary judgments made in secret based on an unspoken moral code of their own creation. Whether this poster from Sin City is problematic I will leave readers to decide, but the MPAA’s justification for rejecting this poster is all too familiar.

It is a fear of women, and sex, and biology; a fear personified in, for some reason, women’s nipples.

Yes. That little baby nurturing bit of body on the breast has become a source of such horror in the US that we have seen legislators take action to protect the public from this danger. I personally am of the opinion that nudity should be allowed everywhere, including in advertising and network television. This argument is not one of sexual desire, but of simple biology, reality, pride. We all have bodies, and those bodies all have the same parts, and those parts come in all different shapes and sizes.

But even if you don’t share my attitude towards nudity, surely we can admit that the obsession with the female nipple has reached absurd limits. The length that some individuals go to expose everything but that little nipple are just astonishing, and indicative of how much importance has been placed on such a common and useful part of the body. You remember what happened when the world realized, for 9/16 of a second, that Janet Jackson had nipples. Apocalypse ensued. Wardrobe malfunction became a household term. The nip-slip became a high-stakes game of tabloid hide and seek, and the campaign against the lady-nipple rose to new heights.

The results of that campaign have led to a dangerous societal focus on the distinct parts of the female body in film and television. Carve up a woman’s body and put it on display in your TV show, movie, anywhere. But whatever you do keep those nipples hidden.

This attitude towards bodies is not without consequence.

A study was released in the European Journal of Social Psychology a while back that showed “women’s sexual body parts were more easily recognized when presented in isolation than when they were presented in the context of their entire bodies.” Women’s bodies are viewed as individual parts, each part is considered separately, a phenomenon that did not occur when looking at men’s bodies. Or, put another way, “Women were perceived in the same ways that objects are viewed.”

Thus an image of Eva Green on a film poster is not an image of Eva Green, but an image consisting of two breasts, light and shadow upon the curvature of those breasts, a darkened area around the nipple, an areola, a white nightgown, lips, eyes etc. By looking at a poster and seeing not Eva Green but her breasts, the MPAA is displaying familiar behavior: fragmenting the female body into component parts, and judging each successive part on its own arbitrary scale of acceptability.

I think of this study anytime a story about restrictions on women’s bodies or restrictions on breastfeeding makes the news. These stories appear more often than you might imagine. The problem of objectification is never more clear than when a women is told to stop breastfeeding: breasts are objects one possesses, and are considered as separate from the whole. Telling a woman she cannot breastfeed is telling her that while she is allowed here, but her boobs are not.

If the MPAA were inclined to reject this poster because of it found the combination of female sexuality and violence a dangerous message for young viewers, I might be willing to discuss. That’s a serious subject for consideration. But do not further the objectification, and fragmentation, of the female body because you are afraid of Eva Green’s breasts.

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