Areolas

Do men have areolas?

You know, those colored rings around the nipples.

Well, if you can't tell from casual observation, go on the Internet and find the answer: "Yes."

Men have areloas and they have nipples and they display them at will, so why don't they get arrested in Lincoln, Nebraska, the way women do? Women who show a nipple or an areola, that is.

Am I kidding? I wish I were. 

The newspaper saw this as a joke: "Nubile Nebraska Nudie Nabbed."

Police Chief Tom Casady did not. He ticketed women for violating the city's public nudity ordinance. He put it this way: "It's unlawful to be naked in public in Lincoln." 

Unless you're a man, he should have added.

The city ordinances call the sight of a female breast or nipple "an offense against public decency." Along with gambling, marijuana, toxic compounds, paraphernalia, spitting on someone, urinating or defecating in public.

Lincoln officials define "nudity," in part, as "the showing of the female breast with less than a fully opaque covering on any part of the areola and nipple." Unless the woman is nursing. How lactation reduces the impact of the indecent sight of a lewd nude female nipple is beyond me.

I see it this way: if Lincoln's going to insist on nipple cover-ups for women, the city should require boobie tassels for men, too. Plus fully opaque covering of the carnal male areola, be it small, big, puffy or flat. 

This brouhaha in Lincoln reminds me of a similar case in Hays, Kansas, in the 1990s. I wrote this poem, "The Provocateur," about that Hays law.

THE PROVOCATEUR 

by Marilyn June Coffey

                     i

Here I live

in a town whose city dads decreed

a bare body, glimpsed though a window

against the law

Here they punish not he who glimpses

but she who bares the body

except in those rare cases

when baring a body in one's own home

might be justified:

say a matron rises naked

unexpectedly from bed

to dash to the phone

receive the news her pere

at 93 has 'passed away' 

as we put it out here

say her bare body

is momentarily glimpsed

that's not illegal

as long as it's not 'provocative'

explained the fathers

changing my definition of the term

from a woman spraddle-legged

on her porch swing, baring

'beaver' as we call it

or leaning out an open window

bare breasts supported by the sill

crooking a finger: 'psssst!'

to myself, 

trekking naked to the frig at 3 a.m.

suddenly again, after all these years

provocative

to him who glimpses me bare

momentarily illuminated

by my night light.

ii

I recall with longing my early naked 

childhood freedom so soon gone

remember my adolescent gazing

at National Geographic spreads

where nubile girls grind grain in public

pert nipples pointing horizonward

where mothers nurse unabashedly

& grand dames swing their dual sacks

hung flat as empty pillow cases 

How I marveled at a life with no 'hurry up

get dressed, Daddy's coming up the walk'

Papa presumably unable to control himself

so I must do it for him.

                iii    

Can't help but wonder

watching my male neighbor

catch the morning breeze 

on his bare torso

as he mows the lawn

can't help but wonder if

after next Friday when I rise

one-breasted from the surgeon's saw

the other but a tuck & scar

can't help but wonder if our 

city fathers will find it 

provocative

should I then strip to my waist

mow my lawn.

Published in The Breast, Global Press, City College of New York, October 1995.