THE BRITISH COLONIZED OUR NIPPLES 🇬🇧☕️🧐

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d1df1ae4-0402-46f6-a729-1c5cf4abe2eb.png

So apparently pre-colonial Indian women just… wore saris without a blouse?? Midriff out, tiddies vibing, nobody cared?? Meanwhile our temples have 10% pure porn on the OUTSIDE WALLS where KIDS could see because kama was a legit life goal???

Then the Victorians showed up, saw all this, had a collective aneurysm, and said “obscene” is now a crime. Let the temples rot. Invented the blouse. Made us feel ashamed of our own ancestors.

“They did not simply colonize our country; they colonized the nipple.”

Anyway 90% of “modest Indian culture” is just Victorian missionaries gaslighting us for 200 years.

Full essay here if u wanna get mad: medium.com/…/khajuraho-erotic-temples-victorian-b…

now go stare at a khajuraho carving and rethink everything 🗿

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Comments

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aeiou@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Reading through history is like, “oh wow what a cool unique culture!” Then you get to the part where a missionary shows up and suddenly there’s a civil/holy war that usually obliterates most traces of the old culture

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- flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  And then they adopt colonizer culture as their own “traditional values” keeping it long after winning the independence.
  
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  - PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    lmao the way we’re out here guarding “tradition” with our whole chest while the brits dropped that nonsense decades ago and are now doing psychedelics in yoga pants 😭
    
    man really said “here’s some shame, keep it forever” and we said “yes sir, framed and enshrined” while they moved on to their third rebrand 💀
    
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- PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  classic. missionaries really said “stop having fun in your own culture, here’s a stitched blouse and some catholic guilt” and then acted surprised when the temples went to shit 😭
  
  the audacity of the “missionary position” being the one they forced on everyone is truly the punchline of history 💀
  
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- lightnsfw@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  If I was a missionary and I saw that statue I would immediately trade my faith in for whatever religion that thing was a part of.
  
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Alvaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Why tag it NSFW? It is a nipple, and one made of rock…

Also by tagging NSFW aren’t you reenforcing the idea that it is obscene?

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- PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Removed, thanks for the suggestion!
  
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  - starik@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Great, now everyone in the office is jerking it
    
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  - baatliwala@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Please put an NSFW tag on this. I was on the train and when I saw this I had to start furiously masturbating. Everyone else gave me strange looks and were saying things like “what the fuck” and “call the police”. I dropped my phone and everyone around me saw this image. Now there is a whole train of men masturbating together at this one image. This is all your fault, you could have prevented this if you had just tagged this post NSFW.
    
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- horn_e4_beaver@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  Why tag it NSFW? It is a nipple, and one made of rock…
  
  Because workplaces tend to be culturally conservative because all sorts of people have to work there what with their diverse ideas of what is suitable for the workplace and what isn’t.
  
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- NewNewAccount@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Because the Victorians won.
  
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gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I KNOW RIGHT?!? finally somebody says it, thank you.

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AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I love the image near the bottom of the article — those women look joyously beautiful p

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- PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  finally a comment that gets it 🙏
  
  material culture, textile crafts, the sheer labor of unstitching colonial shame — you’re speaking my language 💅
  
  and yes those women at the bottom?? that’s the energy we’re trying to get back. joy, bare shoulders, zero fucks. the blueprint 🕯️
  
  here for the nipple reclamation movement ✊🔥
  
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  - Mac@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Your comments read like ChatGPT.
    But, all of them.
    
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hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Same in Cambodia, all across the Angkor temples, naked tiddies everywhere and the occasional dick statue for fertility… … outside, every Khmer woman wearing pajamas and a hat and socks (so as not to tan) even when swimming.

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- PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  they really had temples with dick statues just vibing in the sun and now women are swimming in full pajamas like they’re about to file taxes 💀
  
  missionaries saw a fertility statue and said “actually that’s the problem” and now everyone’s more covered than a Victorian ankle 💔
  
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Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There is a funny story about the ladies just wearing saris.

A priest had gotten used to this over time, out of necessity not to alienate his flock. One day, he announced that the bishop would visit, and that he was not used to bare bosoms, and he asked the women to cover their breasts next Sunday.

So next Sunday, the bishop arrived in his car, and the priest saw that the women did not wear something on top. So he reminded them to cover up, please, now!

So they pulled up their short skirts over their breasts, revealing that they also did not wear underwear…

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lechekaflan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Much of the 18th and 19th century had prudish colonists mostly importing and imposing their beliefs upon native inhabitants, not only forcing modesty on Indian women, but Hawaiian women had to wear shirts to “look presentable” to mostly missionary visitors.

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Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Dick move guys

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gnutrino@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
This is very much glossing over ~600 years of Muslim rule between when the Khajuraho temples were built (and subsequently largely abandoned - likely a major factor behind their survival) and the British arrival…

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- PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  ah yes the classic “but what about the muslims” pivot — never fails 💀
  
  yes, the temples fell out of active worship over centuries. no, the delhi sultanate and mughals did not show up with sewing machines and the indian penal code to mandate stitched blouses and criminalize “obscenity” in 1860. that was the brits. specifically victorian brits. with their specific brand of shame.
  
  you can have multiple colonizers with different approaches. one set looked at the carvings and largely left them alone. the other set looked at them, invented a legal system to call them pornographic, let the temples decay, and then convinced us our grandmothers were ashamed of their own nipples.
  
  the blouse wasn’t a mughal import. it was a victorian one.
  
  but by all means let’s play “who colonized us in what order” bingo while the main point — that we’re still wearing someone else’s shame — flies right past you 🛫
  
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33550336@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Let me just express an opinion that corsets are fucking sexy

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- AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  One of the things that I love about corsets is that they have a long history, where the shape and style of them changed over time. A corset in the Tudor style is going to look different to a Victorian corset, and I find them beautiful in their own ways (and yes, often sexy too).
  
  Having learned of this history makes me appreciate the tragedy of how Indian cultural norms and traditions were smothered by the oppressive rule of the British. It’s a slightly silly hypothetical, but imagine if the dynamic were reversed, and garments like corsets were suppressed due to how structured they are compared to flowing garments like saris. That would suck, because that would mean we’d lose access to an aspect of our cultural heritage. Even for people who know naff all about Western fashion history, if you think that corsets are sexy, then you are partly responding to that history — because everything that came before us becomes embedded in our current cultural understanding.
  
  I know a ton about corsetry, and it’s an incredibly dense and rich topic to learn about. It makes me feel incredibly small to realise that every culture across the world has their own traditions of material culture that are just as rich — but it’s a good kind of feeling small, where I am filled with a sense of awe. I’m glad to hear about women making an effort to reclaim parts of their cultural heritage that have been masked by colonialist oppression.
  
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  - PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    finally someone who gets the depth of textile history without using it to deflect 🙏
    
    and since you’re into corsets — let me introduce you to the ultimate power move: Jnanadanandini Devi.
    
    yes, that Jnanadanandini. sister-in-law to Rabindranath Tagore (Asia’s first Nobel laureate, no big deal). in the essay there’s an illustration of her in a traditional bare-breasted drape. buxom. unapologetic. regal.
    
    so what did the British do when they saw her like that? banned her from their fancy club. because her tiddies were too powerful for their establishment 💀
    
    imagine being told “cover up, we have rules” while they’re out here lacing themselves into rib-crushers just to achieve the illusion of a wasp waist.
    
    and then? she folded. started wearing a blouse. and then — this is the knife twist — she went and popularized the stitched blouse for Bengali women. became the vector. the patient zero of Victorian chest modesty.
    
    so the woman who could’ve been our nipple warrior ended up being the one who strapped us all into the very garment of colonial shame 💀
    
    the brits didn’t just ban her. they converted her. and she converted us.
    
    that’s the real tragedy. not just that they colonized the nipple — but that one of our own handed them the needle and thread ✨
    
    now every blouse you wear is a tiny monument to that club in Bombay that said “your breasts are too much” and she said “okay fine” and we’ve been saying “okay fine” ever since.
    
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- PeshawarToToronto@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  bro really said “corsets are sexy” in the nipple reclamation thread 💀
  
  respectfully, a corset is just victorian scaffolding designed to make breathing optional. meanwhile our grandmothers were out there in an unstitched sari, tiddies free, breeze accessible, no ribs crushed for the sake of fashion. that’s sexy.
  
  colonizers really said “bind your torso so we know you’re civilized” and y’all are out here calling it a vibe 😭
  
  reclaim the drape. let the lungs expand. thank u.
  
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  - 33550336@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    All right, I get your point. I meant modern corsets, which do not harm anyone. I see this is not the best place to express such an opinion.
    
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untorquer@quokk.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Gaslighting is putting this in shitpost

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MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Eeh, they were always that prude?

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