WHAT'S THE BEEF WITH TOPLESS WOMEN?

In short: Their nipples harm children, public peace and traffic

... In February 2017, a U.S. District Court judge granted an injunction on an ordinance banning female toplessness in Fort Collins, Colorado. By a 2-1 margin the judgrs ruled that banning women from going topless is unconstitutional because it’s discriminatory based on gender, and called Fort Collins to remove the phrase “the breast or breasts of a female” from its public indecency ordinance all the way back in 2015.

Such ordinances, sometimes called nudity laws, generally forbid the exposure of male and female genitals, buttocks and pubic areas, but only the chests and nipples of women.

The Fort Collins victory is notable for a few reasons. It’s a federal win, with a decision that now binds the 10th Circuit jurisdiction, which includes the states of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming. It’s also a rare win for an issue that’s moved through courts all over the country at city, state and federal levels, all hinging on more or less the same ideological arguments, with mixed success.

Take New Hampshire’s recent upheld topless ban case, which involved three women who were all arrested for showing their breasts, one for doing yoga at a lakeside beach, sans top, and two other women who, out of solidarity, went to the same beach the next day to sunbathe topless, and were subsequently arrested. They all lost in lower courts, and recently took the case to the New Hampshire State Supreme Court. They lost there, too, and intend to ask the Supreme Court to hear the case in October.

The New Hampshire women’s argument, outlined in the amicus brief filed by the state’s ACLU, makes a similar case that Lane and McNulty did: Defining male chest nudity as different than female chest nudity and only criminalizing one in effect criminalizes being a woman, and is therefore discriminatory. Their state constitution’s own Equal Rights Amendment (which Colorado also has) demands that equality can’t be denied based on race, creed, color, sex or national origin.

In order for the state to discriminate anyway, they must pass a scrutiny test — i.e., provide compelling evidence that it’s in the state’s best interest to continue denying equality. The arguments go like this: Freely bared female nipples will cause public disruption that harms children, anyone of decent moral values and also traffic. “There’s a lot of case law from years ago saying no to this,” Lane explains. “‘Think of the children! What if children knew women’s breasts had nipples? What about the family-friendly atmosphere here in Fort Collins? We’re going to be a hotbed of wild, uncaged nipples.’”

And how do they defend that female nipples are innately more sexual than men’s? After all, you can’t argue that plenty of women and men don’t find men’s chests and bare nipples just as titillating. Basically: Nature.

New Hampshire did so, using other precedent in its favor to back it up. As the case text reads: “It is true that [the ordinance] requires the draping of more parts of the female body than of the male, but only because there are more parts of the female body intimately associated with the procreative function. The fact that the ordinance takes account of this fact does not render it discriminatory. Nature, not the legislative body, created the distinction between that portion of a woman’s body and that of a man’s torso.”

“New Hampshire isn’t the only one to cage the nipples either,” Lane explains. “The 7th Circuit has caged the nipples, too. So has the 8th Circuit.”

Why then did the 10th Circuit agree that it’s unconstitutional and discriminatory to forbid women from taking their shirts off in public, when so many other courts have maintained that letting women go topless will obliterate good society as we know it? It’s a matter of the judges, the strength of the legal case, the sociopolitical climate and myriad other factors. “[Our judges] agreed the sexualization of the female breast is cultural,” Lane says. “When it comes down to the physiology, nipples are nipples.” ....


More: https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/whats-our-legal-beef-with-topless-women


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Personally I'm fine with women baring them tits in public. After all it's an organ not connected to sex, and not structurally different from men's nipples.