August 27, 2009 at 08:03am by Carlos Miller
Women have come a long way in this country from the days that they couldn’t vote and were not allowed to attend college and were not allowed to own property.
But they still have not reached full equality with men. At least when it comes to taking off their shirts.
Only one state has made it legal for women to walk around in public topless in the same manner that men do. And that is New York. And only because of a 1992 court ruling that said it cannot be illegal for a women to be topless if it is legal for a man to be topless.
However, in 2005, 25-year-old Jill Coccaro was arrested in New York City after she removed her top in public. She sued and won $29,000 two years later.
There have been other landmark victories for the so-called topfree movement.
But despite the laws that forbid women from being topless in most other states, most women don’t seem overly concerned about walking around topless. If anything, the real battle is over breastfeeding in public.
However, one group of women – who happen to believe that life on earth was created by aliens – are doing all they can to make it legal to bare their breasts in public.
After all, they argue, the aliens didn’t provide them breasts to keep them covered.
On Sunday, the women and men from GoTopless.org, who are Raelists, took to the streets of Miami Beach; New York; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Columbus, Ohio; and Maui, Hawaii and took off their tops in protest.
Well, down here, they kept little nipples pasties to prevent themselves from getting arrested as they marched down Lincoln Road, chanting “free your mind, free your breasts.”
If the shock factor was what they were after, they failed to get it. After all, bare breasts sans pasties are plentiful on the sands of South Beach.
Most people just looked on amused. A few took photographs. Some women even flashed their own breasts.
In fact, Mr. Clucky has gotten more attention on Lincoln Road than these three almost topless women.
It was anticlimactic considering they spent more than a month hyping up the event, sending jolts of excitement through a few local photographers who ended up encountering more men protesting in bras than women protesting without bras.
However, in Keene, New Hampshire over the weekend, a group of protesters who are not part of the Raelists movement but part of the free state movement, took to the streets wearing open holstered handguns.
One of the gun-strapped protesters was an 18-year-old woman named Cassidy Nicosia was also not wearing a shirt. She ended up arrested for indecent exposure.
So breasts are obviously more threatening than loaded handguns.
Has it always like this?
In Europe, at the start of the Renaissance in the 14th century and lasting until the 19th century, it was not uncommon for women to expose their breasts in public. In fact, a woman’s bare ankles, legs or shoulders were considered more risqué.
Breasts were a common theme in paintings and sculptures and fashion throughout the era. From Wikipedia:
Breast-baring female fashions have been traced to fifteenth-century courtesan Agnès Sorel, mistress to Charles VII of France, whose gowns in the French court sometimes exposed one or both of her breasts. (Jean Fouquet’s portrayal of the Virgin Mary with her left breast uncovered is believed to have taken Sorel as a model.)
Similar fashions became popular in England during the seventeenth century when they were worn by Queen Mary II and by Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I of England, for whom architect Inigo Jones designed a masque costume that fully revealed both of her breasts.[4]
However, the United States has always been influenced by Puritans, so this mentality remained ingrained in our culture.
Topless sunbathing for Europe has been popular in Europe since the mid 1960s, but it only started catching on in Miami during the late 1980s with a sudden influx of European tourists (there have been segregated nude beaches since the 1970s).
So it is technically illegal for a woman to take off her top, but it’s been tolerated since then because, after all, tourists are bringing in money.
But we still don’t know what will happen if a women walks completely topless down Lincoln Road.
Maybe we’ll finally find out during next year’s protest.
 | Carlos Miller is a senior editor at Miami Beach 411. He also operates Photography is Not a Crime, a blog about photographer rights, New Media and First Amendment issues. See more articles by Carlos Miller > |
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