The prohibition on public exposure of breasts by women and girls over 10 years old is now gone from the city code as of this week.
I never thought I’d be conflicted on this, because I am absolutely of the opinion that female breasts and nipples shouldn’t be treated as exclusively sexual body parts, especially since men have them too and we aren’t held to that standard.
But being confronted with the idea that 10-17 year old girls can now bare their breasts in public without restraint reminds me that treating female bodies as non-sexual is great as an ethos, but it is not reflective of reality, and that this specifically could be problematic.
But how to solve it? You can’t make it an 18+ only rule, or you’re further entrenching the idea that female breasts are exclusively sexual and adult, but if you let teens and tweens go topless, they will be sexualized / ogled / photographed by adult men, and that’s a bad precedent to set as acceptable. We usually treat photographs of underage female breasts as a form of CSAM, but can we still say that if we’re treating female breasts as non-sexual? This is an interesting new line to draw, given societal attitudes on adolescent nudity.
Regretfully, I believe that the true problem is men. The reason women have to cover their breasts is because they have to protect themselves from men. I’m all for bodily liberation and the de-sexualization of female existence, but we need an overhaul on our society’s attitudes towards women in general if we’re going to get there. Maybe bare breasts help get us there. Maybe girls need to learn the right way how to kick a man in the balls before they go topless.
Comments like this are why I left reddit. This is a completely hinged and totally reasonable thought process that calls in a question, a lot of facets of the issue and ways them against each other appropriately. Maybe something more crazy would spark a bunch more replies but I totally like that Lemmy is a place that just lets people be normal.
To answer your question, it could be legal grey area because not all pictures depicting nudity are automatically considered pornographic, if you are speaking in terms of legal precedent regarding obscenity in the US.
To further muddy the issue, photographing other peoples kids is considered creepy by nearly everyone but it isn’t expressly illegal unless certain localities have specific statutes against it. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public places, so you have the potential situation where people are doing a presumptively legal activity in a public area where photographing that activity could be illegal depending on… intent?
Further, the courts have ruled that getting naked in public in the act of protesting something is part of protected speech. Presumably that applies to people of all ages and sexes as well but I doubt it has ever been tested.
This is a western society problem, in tribes where women don’t cover their breasts the men are interested in other parts.
These fucking 304s walking around with their exposed ankles will never find a husband. How will they live without a husband to get a bank account for them? They’ll die miserable and destitute, and they’ll deserve it.
And I’m not an incel for saying so, because I have a kid! Checkmate, cucks!
You are inventing a problem that does not exist. Go take a walk where it is allowed and see how many girls are walking topless in the street.
It’s not necessarily because they don’t want to. It’s because in North American culture, it invites harassment. And then people like many of those posting in this thread will just say that they asked for it. So of fucking course women don’t go topless in public.
The true problem is not a problem, it’s the reality of human sexuality where most men and some women see female breasts as sexual most of time.
There are different situations where nudity of all kinds is not perceived sexually, that doesn’t affect the general rule that I shouldn’t run around the block all naked.
Saying it’s not equal because men too have nipples and those are not perceived as sexual is kinda strange. Let’s abolish pregnancy leaves then. Gender may be a social construct by now, sex is obviously not, and (most) humans are not hermaphrodites, so the rules can’t be the same.
This is a nothing burger of a subject frankly, we already know that real world doesn’t fit ideal ideas. If some ideal idea would describe the real world, then you’d only need that ideal idea to know it all and other information wouldn’t matter. Some religious fanatics are actually trying, destroying all the knowledge and art not coming from their holy book.
This doesn’t work, the real world is as complex as all the information in it. An action is good or bad only in a particular real situation.
Which is also why choosing a seemingly ideal enough principle and trying to fit it to everything, pretending that makes everyone equal, is a lie.
Women are allowed to walk around in sandals and no shoes at the beach despite foot fetishes being one of the most common paraphilias(behind breasts.)
You don’t see women getting accosted by guys who like feet because they have their toes out and it’s sexual to some guy nearby.
If dudes into feet can control themselves and be respectful then so can dudes into breasts when they are near a top less woman in public.
So you feel that women should be arrested and prosecutable if their nipples are exposed?
That’s very misogynist. And no, you can’t argue for the law to “save the women” from all those perverts. Because the whole point of this is to free women from the bullshit laws that allows society to prosecute them while pulling double duty by effectively shaming their bodies.
Most women are not going to run around topless voluntarily. But, even if they did - say a group of girls or women decided to go skinny dipping or whatever at a lake, do you really believe they should go to jail for that?
Don’t mansplane and tell everyone these laws are for women’s own good, because they aren’t. Inventing this bizarre photographic scenario is just bizarre. It’s a fiction of your imagination and is a straw man argument.
You are correct that the true problem is men, but not how you think it is.
