Florida may have given women the right to vote 50 years after the 19th amendment was ratified, but there's, ahem, one front where South Florida can consider itself progressive in regards to gender rights. In most parts of Miami Beach, women are allowed to go topless. No, it's not legal. But we guess police have better things to do than tell hundreds South American and European women to put their shirts back on.
As bare chests (and for that matter, ass cheeks) are so de rigueur here, you might take such nudity for granted. In reality, there's only a handful other cites and states that permit the public airing of nipples. The strangest one? Columbus, OH.
The folks over at GoTopless.org are fed up. Why are men allowed to go topless in public but not women? So every year, on the Sunday closest to Women's Equality Day (August 26th), men and women take to the streets to show solidarity for going topless. If we were going to pick an inequality issue to rally behind, we might choose the pay gap between the sexes, but we're funny about stuff like that.
First, an odd disclaimer: GoTopless was founded by a self-described spiritual leader named Maitreya Rael of the Raelian Movement. Even though our blog name is Cultist, we wouldn't normally endorse women's activism from a web site that also teaches that God and aliens are somehow in cahoots. So precede cautiously.
Here's a video from a GoTopless protest out in Venice, California. Yes,
there are exposed nipples (NSFW), but have you been reading? That's the freakin' point.
The Miami "Free Your Breasts" Protest will take over everyone's favorite
pedistrian mall: Lincoln Road. On their website, the organizers state:
Because our wish is not only for our breasts to be "tolerated" while
laying on the sand, we want to have the same right as men. Their chest
is "tolerated" in every public place, why not ours? We dream to be able
to walk down Lincoln Rd. with our shirt open and enjoy the breeze on our
torso the way some men do on a hot summer afternoon. We want women's
bodies to be as free as men's are, that is our constitutional right!
The Topless March starts at Lincoln Road and Washington this Sunday at 4
p.m. The route takes the boobs West on Lincoln to Alton Road, stopping
across from NEXXT Café. Visit www.gotopless.org.
