Who Dares Bare?

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For some it’s a token of the feminist struggle in France for others it’s sleazy postcards from the Côte d’Azur. Topless sunbathing was once the summer battleground of French post-1968 society – educated middle classes insisted that going “topless” was a women’s right, while family groups claimed exposed breasts would intimidate children.

France has prided itself on being the world capital of seaside semi-nudity for years. Now the “L’Hexagon” is facing a bikini top backlash.  The younger generation of French women are covering up, citing new women’s priorities, skin cancer fears and a rebellion against the cult of the fetishised body beautiful.

French academics and historians have spent the early summer months deliberating the sociological meaning of the departure of France’s once favourite piece of beachwear “le string”, the bottom half of a bikini with no top… and returning to a more modest covering for “la plage”.

Since the early 1970s, when the French nation refused to ban “le topless” on beaches, women’s semi-nudity has become a sign of summer in France. It was a position of national pride that the same freedom to bare all in public was a “no-no” in other more prudish nations like the the US.

Women’s bodies have invariably been the centre of national social debates in France. For example, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far right political party, Front National, once produced a poster warning against immigration.  It depicted carefree French topless sunbathers in the 1990s against a doomsday prediction of burqa clad women invading French beaches in the year 2010.

But modern French 18 to 30 year old women are rejecting le topless, boosting the sales of two-piece bikinis, monokinis and even trikinis.

A recent poll found 24% of women were perturbed by semi-nudity on beaches, though 57% said in a garden it was OK. This year, for the first time, going topless will get you fined along the artificial summer beach Paris Plages, which opened on the Seine this week. Mr André Geoffroy, the mayor of Saint-Tropez, argues that the postcard myth of the feminine “charms” of the southern elitist sunspot are outdated as fewer women go topless.

The French media says that it tends to be the women who were involved in the initial women’s lib struggle, many of whom are now in their 60′s, who dispense with tops. One swimsuit designer says that going topless is no longer seen as a feminist act. Young French women see equal pay and work-family balance as more pressing battlegrounds.

In some areas, the battle goes on. Le collectif Tumultueuses, a group of young militant feminists, are still fighting for topless bathing rights in public swimming pools, denouncing the fact that men and women’s bodies are treated differently. “Mon corps si je veux, quand je veux” (My body if I want, when I want) is one of the slogans they have borrowed from the 1970s struggle. In May, when a group of them removed their tops and dived in to Les Halles public pool in Paris, pool assistants tried in vain to get them to cover up.

Earlier topless commando raids at public pools have seen police intervene to stop them. Attendants at Paris’s notoriously strict public pools have argued that if going topless was allowed, swimmers would take more and more liberties such as arriving with no swimming cap or trunks.

In many societies, Men bare their chests, if they want, when they want… What about Women?  Should they have the same freedoms?