Ladies, It's Time to Go Topless

Two dozen women in Maine were scoffed at for getting angry when men ogled their topless march—but female toplessness doesn’t have to be a big deal, and it’s about time we all “grow up a little.” Going bare up there is perfectly legal in many places—and “any day the temperature goes above 55 degrees, we're guaranteed to get an eyeful of male shirtlessness,” writes Mary Elizabeth Williams on Salon—so why don’t women feel comfortable stripping down?

“Maybe because real life is rarely fair or equal,” she continues. We do, after all, “live in a country where a woman taking off her shirt is often seen as a desperate plea for Mardi Gras beads.” If more women started normalizing toplessness, sure, people would stare at first—but maybe we would eventually “find ourselves living in a country with a slightly more mature attitude toward our areolae.”
(More topless stories.)