The New York Times will not print several swear words, but it will, apparently, publish a video featuring so many pairs of naked breasts. Yesterday the paper unveiled a four-minute film titled “Free the Nipple?”, in which many New York women do just that.

The “Free the Nipple” movement is old news—it peaked around 2014 with the release of Lina Esco’s film about topless crusaders in New York and Miley Cyrus’s wholehearted embrace of the idea on Instagram. At this point, for the modern feminist, it is boring. Free the nipple? Sure. I don’t care. Why does the Times?

Even the video itself looks old. The women featured in it are hanging out topless on a sunny day in a New York park, indicating that the whole thing must have been filmed months ago.

In the 262-word story that accompanies the video, the paper offers an explanation as to why “Free the Nipple” is so important now:

O.K. You might be thinking, There’s a gender pay gap. Who cares about nipple censorship?

But the debate about exposed nipples intensified in 2015.: the search term “Free the Nipple” surpassed phrases like “equal pay” and “gender equality” in terms of interest, according to Google trends.

LOL. The New York Times decided to post a video filled with boobs because...people are searching online for boobs.

But did the debate actually “intensify” in 2015? The paper included in the video a graph illustrating the interest in each search term over time, which shows a spike for “Free the Nipple” last April and another smaller spike around September.

The Times may have been able to direct even more online searchers to its video, however, had it posted it when “Free the Nipple” was actually trending. What the video’s graph doesn’t show is that searches for the term peaked in December 2014. Per Google trends:

You can still watch the video below, if you’re into that sort of thing.


Screencap via the Times. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.