It's a question that has to be asked: what's with all of the nipple trauma in movies this year?!

In the cartoonishly over-the-top Jason Statham action movie Crank: High Voltage, the single most cringe-inducing scene involves something very nasty happening to a character’s nipples (if you've seen the film, you know what I'm talking about; if you haven't, I'll spare you the details). Ouch. This comes hot on the heels of the trauma displayed at the Calgary Underground Film Festival, where nipples got electrocuted in Big Man Japan (2007), and audiences got their first taste of “nursing horror” in Grace (2009).

If this trend continues, we might start seeing nipples burst into flames in a romantic comedy. Every third gunshot in Lethal Weapon 6 will blow off a nipple. Cursed nipples will turn into dimensional gateways, summoning demons from the depths of the Stygian pits. It's almost as if Hollywood, Japan and Canada were in on a global cinematic conspiracy to turn us all into nervous wrecks who scream at the sight of an areola. (Janet Jackson might reasonably point out that this has happened already.)

I propose that we reverse this trend. Movies should start being nice to nipples. Let them bounce and play in the sunshine. Give us plenty of healthy, uninjured bosoms until we're conditioned to love them again. If you need that PG rating, just give us wet T-shirts and side-boob; we're not picky. Smother us with wobbling pinkness until we motorboat the movie screen. Let boobs back into the Super Bowl halftime show — but no nipple clamps this time. Clamping nipples is contrary to what I'm trying to accomplish here.

Nipples nourished us as infants. The least we can do to pay them back is give them some decent screen time.