(Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Selects)

America has a love-hate relationship with breasts. Images of them are everywhere, and yet women who dare to expose the real thing in public�even to breast-feed�are often treated like they’re breaking the law. So activist Lina Esco made a film, Free the Nipple, which tells the story of a group of topless female crusaders.

�I wanted to shoot in New York because it’s been legal to be topless here since 1992,� Esco says, referring to People v. Ramona Santorelli and Mary Lou Schloss. After seven women were arrested for exposing their breasts in a Rochester park, the New York State Court of Appeals agreed that the charge was �discriminatory on its face since it defines �private or intimate parts’ of a woman’s but not a man’s body as including a specific part of the breast.� Basically, if men can show some areola, it shouldn’t be illegal for women to.

But in reality, the NYPD rarely remembers to honor that law�Esco was threatened with arrest her first week of shooting. Fortunately, she managed to dodge cops just long enough to get her exterior shots, including a mad, shirt-free dash across Times Square that she describes as the scariest and most empowering five minutes of her life.

Free the Nipple has gone from a film project to a full-on viral campaign, garnering celebrity supporters like Lena Dunham, Miley Cyrus, and Russell Simmons. Earlier this year, in protest of Instagram’s censorship policies, Scout Willis took a casual, nipples-out stroll through the streets of downtown New York to prove a point: You can’t show nipples on Instagram, but you absolutely can in this city.