I give nipples three years. Five tops. Even as I write I’m getting that familiar dissonance, like when you repeat a word so many times, “nipple, nipple, nipple,” that it loses all meaning, instead becoming an abstract song that threatens to unravel the concept of language itself. I’m forgetting what they’re for, where they live, why. “Nipples.” Finished. Their decline began on Instagram, where, while breasts are fine, nipples must be blurred out. Which is helpful in a way, in that it clarifies the boundaries of sexiness, like a butcher drawing lines on a cow. Any photos which feature a female nipple are promptly removed, leading to a smoothness of image, an idealisation of the empty chest, treasureless. If you learned about what people looked like from the photos on your phone, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were all hills with no peaks.
Which surely was one of the factors that prompted this, from the Plastic Surgery Group, in their round-up of cosmetic trend predictions for 2017: “We have seen a 30% rise in women requesting a smaller nipple size in the last year.” The new fashionable body look, they say, is “the ultra-toned, shredded athletic type… ” Like a snazzy tie compliments a suit, or a simple up-do sets off your massive diamond necklace, little Smartie-like nipples will make your muscles sing.
So this year Britain will see, they promise, thousands of stuck-on tiny nipples. Which means it’s surely only a matter of time before women decide it’s easier, cleaner, to just do away with them altogether. Especially in a country with one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, today’s mothers having chosen bottles and maternal guilt over pain, exhaustion and side-eyes from strangers. What’s the point?
I do wonder what would happen if we all followed these annual “body trends” properly, swelling and smoothing like the evolution of man chart except with tits. Arses rising, thighs dwindling, breasts running ahead, then retreating as though they’d encountered rain. The “natural look” dragging everything closer to the ground, skin sparkling with botulism from beneath.
We would all look 19 forever, our insides covered with moss and knowledge, our foreheads tight as cling film. Recently Vogue declared the cleavage was “over”, noting that celebrities were binning off their deep V gowns, choosing fashion that showcased their clavicles instead. Bonfires of big bouncing boobs still smoulder across the country, as women emerge from surgery with their new perky B cups, just a suggestion of drawing-pin nipple bothering the silk of their soft-cup bralette.
Cleavage appears now in another form, having sunk some inches towards the hips where it’s been rebranded as an “ab crack” and thus deemed far less vulgar than the previous tit crack – after all, with the right bra, anybody can achieve one of those.
Still, few would have guessed that nipples would become the new battleground on which to play out our insecurities with the judgment of sharp scalpels. And, honestly, who has the energy to defend them? After all these tiny wars about what a body is for, all these debates about hair and weight and the point of lives. Who of us has the breath left in them to stand up for nipples that stand up, for the suckled, chewed on, plate-like or swollen? For nipples with a wrestler’s BMI, so ponderous and large that they’re visible through a stab vest? For wry nipples, cynical nipples, nipples whittled from discounted Peperami sticks or those like hard-boiled eggs with eyebrows drawn on?
Who today doesn’t read about cosmetic surgery trends and see the high street fill with crop tops, smell that new season’s stench of anxiety and feel their whole beings glaze over with an apathy last experienced watching Jools Holland’s Hootenanny? Isn’t it easier, now, to let ourselves slide, either into the invisibility cloaks of deeply unfashionable bodies or indeed into the Plastic Surgery Group’s recommended chairs, where our nipples will fall to the floor with a muffled clang, along with last year’s tits and tomorrow’s crows feet, and just… play nice?
I can see the end of nipples, and with it the end of trying and caring, and the end. The very end.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman