SHOULD WOMEN BE TOPLESS IN PUBLIC?

As part of Bazaar.com’s week-long issue discussing all things nude, we investigate if women should have the right to go topless in public.

In1934 it was still illegal for men to show their nipples in public. This led to a mass arrest of topless men in New Jersey and a handful of $1 fines given to those who dared to bare their chests on Coney Island, until finally, in 1936, the guardians of national decency relented, giving men the right to go topless in public. Eighty years later, the sight of a topless man has gone from being regarded as lewd and obscene to “utterly ordinary”—something that Alethea Andrews, founder of New York’s Outdoor Co-Ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society, hopes women will, one day, experience for themselves.

“We’re used to seeing men’s bare chests in public, but a century ago that was roughly as scandalous as a woman’s bare chest today,” Andrews explains. “At some point, men insisted on their right to bare their chests, and over the course of a generation, it has become the new normal. Hopefully the same will happen for women. It will just take time.”

read more – Source: Bazaar