Nantucket To Allow Topless Women On All Beaches To Promote Gender Equality

Nantucket, an island off of Cape Cod, is known for its pristine beaches and celebrity sightings. On Tuesday, Nantucket approved a measure allowing women to go topless on all of the town’s beaches (men were, not surprisingly, already permitted to do so). Throughout the United States, the fight for gender equality in laws that allow men, but not women, to bare their chests in public has been raging for decades.

The Gender Equality on Beaches bylaw amendment passed with a vote of 327-242 following a debate at the annual town meeting in Nantucket. The measure isn’t quite a done deal, as it still needs the approval of the Massachusetts Attorney General before it goes into effect. Currently, only men can go topless on Nantucket’s beaches, and topless women can face a fine of up to $300 and up to three years in prison.

The measure was proposed by seventh-generation Nantucket resident Dorothy Stover, founder of the Nantucket School of Love. Stover says it was a comic strip featuring a topless man and woman with identical bodies that originally inspired her to consider the unfairness of the current rules.

Stover sees topless rights as an issue of gender equality. “I was at the beach, and I had a moment when I wanted to take my top off, and I realized I couldn’t. And I started to look around the beach, and I noticed that many men had larger breasts than I do,” she said. She says she investigated breast anatomy and learned that male and female breasts aren’t that different, and there’s even some evidence of male lactation. She saw no reason why men could expose their breasts and women could not.

Not everyone agreed with the Nantucket measure. One meeting attendee argued, “If I have to go topless to prove that I am equal to a male, there is something wrong with that concept.” Another countered that, although she didn’t want to go topless herself, “choice is a good thing.” Stover said the majority of the measure’s female supporters were not necessarily going to remove their tops on the beach but thought women should have the choice.

History Of The Fight For Female Toplessness

Women have been fighting for the right to go topless for decades with mixed results. In 1986, in Rochester, New York, seven women removed their tops in a park to protest the state law prohibiting women from going topless in public. In July of 1992, charges against Rochester’s “topfree seven” were dismissed by the state Court of Appeals. The judges said that including women’s breasts under “private or intimate parts of her body” created “a clear, gender-based classification.” It’s now legal for women to go topless in the state of New York, including New York City.

Since then, women have challenged the law in other states. According to the topless advocacy group Go Topless, there are only three states, Utah, Indiana and Tennessee where revealing a female breast is illegal according to state law. In another 14 states, the laws are not clear on the matter.

That doesn’t mean that female toplessness is legal in the remaining 33 states. Even when permitted by state law, local ordinances can still outlaw toplessness. For example, it’s legal for women to go topless in California, but Los Angeles County prohibits female toplessness in public, including in its parks and on its beaches. The current LA law very specifically prohibits, “any portion of the breast at or below the upper edge of the areola thereof of any female person, is exposed to public view, except in those portions of a comfort station, if any, expressly set aside for such purpose.”

Men were not always allowed to go topless, and they had to fight for the right as well. In 1935, police arrested and fined 42 men who protested the laws by swimming topless on the beach in Atlantic City. By 1937, the laws changed, and men were free to bathe in Atlantic City without covering their tops. Now men are commonly seen without tops on beaches and in urban areas.

Stover says that the problem is that some people believe female breasts are inherently sexual, and they don’t realize that it is society that sexualizes women’s breasts. In a University of California, Irvine Law Review article entitled Female Toplessness: Gender Equality’s Next Frontier, Nassim Alisobhani concurs. She writes, “Female topless prohibitions are the embodiment of gender discrimination. It is one of the remaining laws that blatantly treat men and women differently on the basis of how society views their bodies and the biological differences between the sexes. Paternalistic notions that a woman needs the laws to protect her from a man’s gaze and his uncontrollable desire to touch her if he sees her bare chest undermine the struggle for gender equality.”

Reena Glazer, a law professor at Georgetown, emphasizes that the laws prohibiting female toplessness aren’t about the topless women, but about the men viewing them. She wrote in the Duke Law Journal, that these laws are “written solely to take into account potential viewers. The focus is on the male response to viewing topless women; there is no focus on the female actor herself.” Interestingly, many of the statutes prohibiting topless women have an exemption for topless entertainment. “What might arouse men can only be displayed when men want to be aroused,” Glazer explained.

Social Media and #FreeTheNipple

The fight for equality in topless rules extends to the cyber world as well. Celebrities, like Chelsea Handler and Miley Cyrus, have joined in the fight to increase breast equality on social media, putting pressure on Facebook and Instagram to treat female and male nipples equally. Currently, Facebook and Instagram do not allow photos of female breasts on their sites (with the exception of breastfeeding, protesting, and mastectomy photos), but they do permit photos of male breasts. The hashtag #FreeTheNipple was created to raise awareness of this disparity.

Scout Willis, daughter of the actors Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, tweeted shirtless photos of herself on New York City sidewalks to raise awareness of Instagram’s restrictions. One tweet read “Legal in NYC but not on @instagram,” and another, “what @instragram won’t let you see, #FreeTheNipple.”

Stover says the earliest the Nantucket law could be approved by the Attorney General is August or September, so for this summer, Nantucket women will still need to keep their tops on. For others interested in joining in the fight to challenge topless laws, GoTopless Day, as organized by GoTopless.org, is scheduled for August 22^nd, the first Sunday after Women’s Equality Day. “It is only logical that GoTopless Day protests would be based on Women’s Equality Day since the right to go topless for women is based on gender equality as their right to vote once was,” the site reports.