As mentioned before on this blog, boobs are Kind of A Big Deal [1]. For some reason, individuals and Facebook alike [2]have a strong negative reaction to the public display of nipples and the fatty tissue surrounding them. An unprovoked showing of a female breast especially leaves individuals a-titter. Usually, for the protection of children and society, women are expected to keep their goods locked up.
Ah, but I live in Ohio- such an enlightened state. Ok, ok, we are actually ranked dead last for gay rights protection [3], but when it comes to breast exposure protection, we are totally progressive. Except that women don’t stroll around Ohio topless very much. Barring the rare drugged-out music festival where a handful of women prance about with painted breasts, one can hardly tell that Ohio law protects bare female nipples at all.
The social taboo against bare-breast-baring holds a heavy weight over those women who might otherwise go topless, apparently. The only way to make this legal right truly exercisable is to strip female breasts of their social trappings, so to speak. This was the idea that birthed Tit-ical Mass, an impromptu breast walk that occurred in Columbus last Friday.
I was spending the night at a local cafe/bar with my gaggle of hypersensitive radical feminist friends (who inspired frustrated posts like this one [4]), when one remarked that she wished she really could go topless. One woman with bare boobs just doesn’t feel safe, she complained, but a large enough group of women could overpower the social constraints against breast-baring. The notion was borrowed from the bicycling activism of Critical Mass [5], an national movement wherein a large group of bicyclists take over the streets once a month in order to protest laws and driving practices that endanger cyclists.
If we all get topless, my friend argued, then we will all feel free and not be too terribly harassed. She quickly assembled a group of women to patrol the streets that very night, sans shirts and bras.
I followed, though I did not strip. I can’t explain why I didn’t, but I think it has to do with my weird post-feminist post-gender-salience situation [6]. I don’t think I would walk around topless even if their weren’t social mores against it, and I certainly wouldn’t do it to stand up for some gender I am only incidentally a part of. But the wannabe social scientist in me had to follow the event nonetheless.
It was about 10 or 11 pm on a Friday. The women, and several men with a sharp ironic instinct, removed their shirts. We began to walk down one of the busiest roads in Columbus, where college students hang out to drink, eat and think about sports. At first, nothing happened. No comments or honking horns or people seeming at all a-titter. I felt a huge swell of relief. It’s not a big deal. It’s not a big deal. Cool.
After a few minutes, I noticed some guys snapping camera phone pictures and smiling broadly. No direct harassment, nothing terrible. As the group neared the epicenter of college life, however, things began to heat up. Drunken frat-ish boys hollered as the walked past. Cars slowed down to snap more photos of the topless women. A man yelled, “You ladies want to get fucked tonight?!”
As we stopped to wait at an intersection, a stumbling-drunk man leaned in and put his hand on one topless woman’s shoulder, grabbing at her slightly. “I smell some no-deodorant-wearing bitches!” He yelled. One of the other women pushed the man away. “Don’t you touch her, don’t you dare touch her!” she screamed.
The drunk and his buddies scattered a bit, but they hadn’t left for good. They followed us down the street, forcing their way into the crowd of topless women, mumbling curses and insults. They had to be pushed away and harangued two times more before they left the group alone. The woman who was directly touched appeared visibly shaken and violated. She put her shirt back on.
The yelled insults and sexual insinuations that met these women truly surprised me. Of course I expected some taunting and honking, as clothed individuals meet some measure of that every day. Yet almost every man or group of men that passed either took a picture, said something suggestive or made a gesture that the women perceived as crass and unacceptable. A few I would excuse- the two young men who gave our group a hearty thumbs-up, I think, meant well.
The sheer number of catcalls bring one thought to my mind: many of these men do not regularly yell at women, even women in very skimpy clothes. Only a certain, pretty small subset of the population does that. Yet the removal of one or two extra articles of clothing suddenly makes many more men willing to scream obscene and sexual things. How bizarre that a bare breast has such a hold over people!
This strange fact actually gives me hope. A woman in a tiny miniskirt would have been insulted and disrespected even a few decades ago. A woman in normal, reserved western street clothes is sometimes harassed in the Muslim world where burkas are common.
This suggests that some of the reaction is conditioned and relative- it is not all some terrible and ingrained piggish instinct. With exposure to breasts in normal situations, they will lose much of their erotic tug on people. This is not to say boobs will ever be stripped of their significance- I bet we will always look at them with a bit of extra interest. But we can escape nipple phobia.
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