“A thorough understanding of pro-topless advocates’ concerns requires going beyond the issue of legal consistency. Part of what topless advocates object to in gender unequal topless laws are the implications of the underlying messages the laws could be (perhaps unwittingly) reinforcing. The problem, as Reena Glazer wrote in the Duke Law Journal in 1993, is that laws like that in the 1986 case 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.” The implication, she argued, particularly when laid next to the statute’s “exemption for topless entertainment” is that “what might arouse men can only be displayed when men want to be aroused.” By contrast, “men are free to expose their chests … with no consideration of the impact on possible viewers.” That’s where the real damage of these laws comes in: Though it’s unlikely that many men, if suddenly forced to don a shirt while, say, out for a jog, would find their worlds or senses of self greatly affected, the disparity in treatment of the genders appears to offer legal validation that a man’s view of a woman’s body is the only one that matters. The underlying message to the public is that women’s bodies are inherently sexual, and thus inappropriate to be seen in public. The question then becomes much more basic than whether or not being topless in public is permissible. The issue becomes a matter of women being able to exist and be seen as something other than sexual creatures. The thinking which fuels laws against female toplessness supports the attitude that women are in a perpetual state of sexual engagement, whereas men are allowed to exist in a whole range of bodily states, some of them benign enough to permit the exposure of their chests without it being considered automatically indecent. Proponents of topless equality assert that laws that single out women are effectively perpetuating a degrading cultural norm towards sexualizing women’s bodies without their consent. The concern is that the laws incidentally support a larger mentality of objectifying women.” - from an article in The Atlantic (at Barcelona, Spain)
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