Topless freedom is causing polemic!
In 2023, it was announced that women were given the green light to swim topless in public pools in Berlin. This was initially due to a discrimination complaint — a woman complained after feeling discriminated against when she was prevented from swimming topless in a public pool.
The case took place in December 2022. A woman filed a complaint with the “Department of Justice, Diversity and Anti-Discrimination,” and that was enough for the Berlin municipality to agree with her argument and change the rules three months later — thus, the Berlin municipality began allowing women, men, and non-binary people to swim and sunbathe without any type of top clothing.
Several women have already filed formal and informal complaints about what happened, in many cases they are asked to cover themselves or are seen as sexual objects. A French woman who was in Germany with her 5-year-old son was approached while she was topless and asked to cover herself, she said: “For me — and I teach this to my son — there is no such difference. Whether for men or for women, breasts are a secondary sexual characteristic, however men have the freedom to take off their clothes when it is hot and women do not.”
Not only in Berlin, but several German cities have already recognized the right of women to go topless, just like men. In 2022, in Lower Saxony, Siegen and North Rhine-Westphalia, they had already allowed women to swim without a bra.
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This is in line with the gender equality initiative and only requires that “primary sexual organs” be covered in swimming pools. BBB only clarified that this applies to all visitors, regardless of gender.
I was scrolling through my feed the other day and saw several recent news stories about the official permission for women to go topless, and most of the comments were from men who agreed with the law, but practically all of them were “disgusting” and “sexualized.” We all know that society, although it claims to be progressive, greatly stigmatizes the female body, especially when it comes to breasts — most people (especially men) sexualize women’s breasts a lot and see this as a sexual part of the body and not as something normal that can go unnoticed like the male body.
One comment (of a man) stated that “women have more fat in their breasts, obviously that draws attention,” which is ironic because many men have considerably large breasts, some even larger than some women, and not all women have such large breasts. Even if they did, why are women’s breasts considered something sexual and men’s not? The excuse of size no longer holds water, nor does the excuse of “distraction,” because if breasts are a distraction, shouldn’t muscles be too?
Many people spend hours staring at someone’s muscles, whether on Instagram, TikTok, or even at beaches and pools. In other words, we’ve reached the point where we agree that if women’s breasts are a “distraction,” as many men say, then men’s muscles are also a great distraction for other people.
But of course, this subject isn’t addressed because, whether we like it or not, we still live in an extremely hypocritical and sexist society. However, several years ago, when I went on vacation to the beach, both in the south of the country and in Spain, there were already some women going topless on the beaches and some hotel pools, and from what I noticed, almost no one paid attention — and that’s a good thing, because that way they can walk around freely and comfortably topless like any other man, after all, we should have equal rights, shouldn’t we? But to what extent?
Are female breasts really something sexual that should be covered like genitals? Then why don’t men with larger chests need to cover themselves? Why isn’t it considered exposure in men, but in women? A lot of controversy and opinions for a single topic that is extremely important and deserves respectful and impartial visibility — sadly it’s a topic that doesn’t receive the attention or respect it deserves, and when it does get some visibility, it’s mostly just sexist and controversial comments.
