Is America Ready for Topfreedom??

It really struck me the other day when I read the ALL of the beaches in Spain are topfree, and I realized how hung-up and sexually immature we are as a society here in America. The female breast has become the premier symbol of female sexuality. Adolescent petting of the female breast is "getting to first base", and millions of male teenagers learned to masturbate to the well-endowned "girls next door" in Playboy and Penthouse. If you go to the Sports Illustrated web site, there is a tab specifically for "Swimsuit" right next to the tab for "SIKids.com", and there is no argument on earth that can explain why nearly-naked models in sexy bikinis have anything to do with sports, other that to appeal to male prurient interests.

"Our society still doesn’t recognize the functional use of breasts,” says Karen Peters, executive director of the Breast Feeding Task Force of Greater Los Angeles. “It only recognizes the sexual aspect.”

We appear to have reached the tipping point on this issue, now that the mere sight of a female nipple sends people into hysterics and crying "what about the children?" What we need is a "Rosa Parks" of topfreedom to begin the reversal of this unhealthy collective attitude towards something as simple and basic to life as the female breast.

There are positive things happening. Laws are being passed all over America allowing women to breastfeed in any public place. Wikipedia has a list of jurisdictions in North America where topfree equality exists by law. The Topfree Equal Rights Association exists to help "women who encounter difficulty going without tops in public places in Canada and the USA, and informs the public on this issue". Photographer Jordan Matter's project "Uncovered" is a collection of images showing bare-breasted in and around New York, wihtout sexualizing or ojectifying them, as if the woman had the same freedom as men to go shirtless. In December, a Florida woman won the second of two cases in her fight for the right to bare her breasts in public as political protest.

The movement needs a figurehead, someone who can set an example and inspire others to drop the top. The people at TERA correctly point out that the appearance of a shirtless Clark Gable in "It Happened One Night" began the movement to overturn prohibitions against men removing their shirts in public. And while there are certainly many women who have appeared nude in films for the past 50 years, virtually none have done so in a non-sexual situation. One scene that comes to mind is from the Robert Altman film "Short Cuts", where a bottomless Julianne Moore has a fight with her husband (played by Matthew Modine), fully exposed but completely indifferent to her own nakedness. There needs to be someone with cultural clout to come forward and endorse topfreedom. Imagine the impact of someone like Oprah Winfrey telling her audience that she went topfree in Spain and loved the experience.

Nudity is normal in everday life, when changing clothes, when bathing, when making love, when in the locker room, etc. How odd it is that we put on clothes to go to the beach where activities like swimming and sunbathing are best experienced in the nude. I believe that this decade will be the era in which topfree equality is achieved on American beaches. If hundreds of women go the beach and remove their tops, there will be no law, no statute, no ordinance, and no morally outraged Christianist organization that will be able to reverse the effect.

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