Thelephobia, nice knowin’ ya

Nipples are weird. I’m not saying they’re gross or lewd or disgusting, in fact I think they’re pretty awesome. I’m going to go even further and say that any law against the public display of nipples is just plain silly. When Janet Jackson’s nipple was exposed during Super Bowl six-million-three-hundred-or-whatever-it-was, I didn’t think it was a big deal. And if a woman wants to breastfeed her child in public, I’m not going to complain. I think it’s quite beautiful, unless that child is a 37-year-old business man or she suddenly screams “Food fight!” and starts spraying the rest of the people on the bus and my sudoku gets all lactated on.

No, I don’t think nipples are gross. I just think they’re weird. Especially on men. Why do we have them? Unlike other now-useless body parts like appendixes and wisdom teeth, they’ve never really served a practical purpose. The only men I could see them ever being useful for are Chippendales dancers, so they know when their bowties are on straight. But for the rest of us, they’re foreign and mysterious, like little fleshy flying saucers that just landed on our chests one day and decided to stay.

Guys, have you ever really studied your nipples? You should. Don’t worry, it won’t make you gay. (Unless doing so causes you to imagine Zac Efron carefully flicking his tongue/blowing on them, in which case that probably means you either already are gay or have at least a mild proclivity towards fagdom. Either way, that’s cool, man.) But really, take the time to study the oblique circumference of the areolas. Notice the gentle slope of the nipple and how it sits composed atop its fleshy base like a pink igloo, then notice how gentle prodding triggers your pilomotor reflexes—the same that triggers goose bumps—to contract the cylindrically-arranged muscle cells within causing them to obstinately stand at attention. Now take a clothespin…just kidding.

Normally, nipples aren’t really on my mind. But I found myself unable to escape the thought of them ever since I was quarantined for several hours in a small four-and-a-half in Outremont with 40 topless men getting wasted and eating spiced olives. Now, it may sound like I was involved in some kind of throwback Bacchanalian ritual of ancient Greece, or maybe a circuit party meet ’n’ greet, but the experience was actually part of a performance. Well, it was more the preparation for a performance. We had gathered there, nips to the air, because we were asked to be part of Jerusalem in My Heart, the act scheduled to open for gothic vocal sorceress Diamanda Galás during the Pop Montreal festival.

When I first got the call to join the choir, it seemed pretty simple: “A group of men are going to be topless, covered with white body paint and there may be some screaming and slapping involved.” Sounded pretty much like a regular Saturday night to me. There was a catch, however: on Diamanda’s 30-page rider (which is the list of artist demands that can range in specificity from the number of bottles of water on stage to a vegan buffet prepared by an Icelandic midget who must be wearing platform shoes with heels containing a small aquarium harbouring exactly one gold fish and one sea anemone), she requested that the backstage area be reserved entirely for her and her crew. This means 40 half-naked white-painted men would have to do their getting half-naked and white-painting somewhere outside the building. So the plan was to get prepped several blocks away at an apartment and walk through the streets to the Outremont theatre topless, painted white and drunk out of our minds (admittedly the biggest and most important part of preparation was getting shitfaced enough to do it)—an idea that seemed so ridiculous that I had to say yes.

I’m not going into the particulars of the performance, which was, to some, quite controversial. I am here to talk about the nipples. I saw many that night, possibly more than I’d ever seen in a small room ever in my life.

I know it may sound like I’m obsessed, but trust me, it’s really not until you’re in a 12-by-12-foot room full of men’s bare chests staring at you like big fleshy owls that you really start thinking about the sheer variety of these bodily ornaments. That night made me think about how special and different we all are. It was a way to rediscover the individuality of our being. Nipples are unique, just like snowflakes. That is, if snowflakes were pink and brown and some snowflakes had big ol’ hairs sticking out of ’em.

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA