The French beach of Pampelonne, which during the seventies and eighties became one of the great symbols of European body liberation, is far away. Press photographs showed stretches of sand dotted with umbrellas and bodies where the topless was not the exception, but the norm. Nor were the Costa Brava, Costa Daurada, Costa del Sol, or Ibiza, where the spirit hippy and the impulse of the sexual revolution turned the bare breast into an expression of freedom. Slim Aarons' photographs immortalized that carefree way of inhabiting Mediterranean leisure, where the semi-naked bodies of bathers were part of the landscape naturally, without dramatization or scandal. It was not about sexualizing the body, but, precisely, about freeing it from the gaze that turned it into an object and relieving it of the weight of centuries of moral demonization.That landscape, however, today seems almost like an archive photograph. Not only because fifty years have passed, but also because the reality it represented has been fading away. The topless, which for decades was part of the usual scenery of Mediterranean beaches, is today an increasingly exceptional practice. Data suggests that, compared to the eighties, it has decreased by two-thirds. And the paradox is that the women who continue to practice it the most are precisely those who grew up during the sexual revolution. The younger ones, on the other hand, have hardly even incorporated it. What has happened for what seemed like a conquest of bodily freedom to have receded?Breasts are exactly the same as forty years ago. What has changed is the world that observes them. When a woman decided to leave them exposed, she knew who would see them, how, and for how long. When leaving the beach, that exposure also ended. Today, on the other hand, a woman can leave the sand, but if someone has taken a photograph of her, her image will continue to circulate indefinitely on others' screens, becoming, in the best case, content for social networks and, in the worst, a lure for sexual content pages. The moment a photograph escapes our control, so does a part of our body.Furthermore, social networks, along with the media, have exponentially intensified the pressure on bodies, which seem to have to respond more than ever to canons of perfection to deserve to be shown. Beaches and swimming pools have ceased to be friendly spaces for body diversity. Bodies forced to coexist with the scrutinizing gaze of others and, above all, with their own, often even more cruel, the result of a self-esteem eroded by a system that turns insecurity into a business.When the feminist struggles of the seventies denounced the sexualization of women's bodies, they already sensed that this battle would not be easy. Half a century later, it continues to be one of the great open fronts. There will be those who consider it inevitable to sexualize female breasts, as if it were a natural instinct against which it would be useless to rebel. But history proves precisely the opposite. During the first half of the 20th century, male nipples were also the object of censorship and scandal. Only when men began to uncover their torsos normally on beaches did that moral burden begin to fade. The sexualization of the body, therefore, is not immutable, but simply the result of a cultural construction, even if we want to dress it up as natural.The paradox is that we have never lived with so many images of naked bodies and, yet, for decades they have not been so unfree. Captives of aesthetic pressure and the surveillance society, the youngest have inherited more images of the body than their mothers, but less freedom to inhabit it.