There are two items missing from the following story which was covered in local and national news. And those two items are: shirts and some members’ ability to imagine predictable consequences.
This bit happened a few days ago, so you’ll have to excuse my tardiness (it’s the beginning of the business year for me). It seems that protesters in the state of Maine on April 5th had staged a topless parade down a public street “to bring attention to what they claim is a double standard when it comes to the public display of upper torsos.”
Excellent! I’m all for plenty of that. But, beneath the surface, there were a few fickle currents which warrant some curiosity. As it turns-out, it is possible to be absolutely correct and yet be oh-so dumb about particulars.
I’m referring to one of the protest organizers going by the name of Ty MacDowell. She expressed some disappointment in the number of male spectators who showed-up with their cameras a-clicking. As if it was something to take pictures of.
Yes, I’m sure she was completely blindsided by something so clearly unforeseeable:
“I’m really upset by the men … all the men that are here, just like watching it like it’s a parade,” she said.
Uh, well my dear Ty… maybe that’s because— it was a parade?
Face? Meet my palm.
I suppose the march organizers really wanted it to be a kind of low-key affair that few people would see. Hence, it was advertised in advance, complete with police escorts through a crowded public area of the largest city in Maine. So that no strangers could take pictures of it, obviously.
Forgive my cynicism, but Ty’s “upset” seems a bit phony.
According to Ms. MacDowell, the point of the march was so that a topless woman in public “shouldn’t attract any more attention than a man who walks around without a shirt.” Ah.
With utmost respect, Ty? Yeah, maybe that was your point. But who cares?
(Jazz Hands!)
The above anecdote, in a nutshell, nicely captures the absurdity of a particular strain of feminist activism which eschews the world as it actually exists in favor of airy figments which were plucked from some sociologists’ fever-dreams circa 1971 and kept pickled in a jar of formaldehyde.
In this case, I’m talking about the scientifically-dubious notion that mans tendency to become visually-aroused by a woman’s body is an artificial social construct which can be erased via psychological reconditioning. Which is to say: by default, heterosexual men are not aroused by the female body for biological reasons. They learn the arousal and they can one day un-learn it. (Ironically, subscribers to this body of theory tend to turn on a dime and resolutely re-discover the importance of scientific rigor in order to attack the equally dubious idea that gay men could be similarly reconditioned.)
Indeed, one participant at the march was particularly brazen in signaling her use of non-thought: “We should be able to walk down the street and not have this many men taking pictures of us,” she insisted.
Ah, you should be able to if you want to? Perhaps, cupcake, perhaps. And I should be able to let total strangers borrow my car for a weekend if I want to. But I can’t guarantee how they’ll act.
My lovelies, I am sorry to say it, but when you insist that a woman’s breasts should be seen as not being significantly different from a man’s bare chest, you are telling me that a Victoria Secret catalog ought to be as un-sexy to me as the stack of old Collier’s Weeklies sitting in your grandma’s attic. Which is quite un-sexy indeed.
Additionally, I cannot help but wonder how one can produce a Topless Fem-topia in which nobody stares at each other without creating a kind of DisneyWorld police-state. But fortunately, the quoted placard-waving Utopian visionary doesn’t worry about the messy implications of her words when it’s easier to simply pen an unreflective wish-list to Santa Claus. In fact, I wonder if the speaker was slightly disappointed that the police escorts didn’t bother to smash a few cameras to avenge how uncomfortable she felt from the incessant snapping and clicking.
It’s complaints like those which truly make my head spin. Try to imagine, for a second, that I took a collection of carefully-selected dance music to a public park and played them on a big pair of speakers. I erect a set of colorful posters saying ‘FREE DANCE MUSIC TODAY!’ And when people stop to listen, what am I going to say? “Shoo! Stop listening!”? Oh, please.
Furthermore, if any members of a topless cohort are truly uncomfortable with being photographed without permission, they should probably avoid walking near any ATMs. Those things have cameras which are switched-on 24/7, you know. Hey, and lots of secure buildings have cameras on them, too. Plenty of police cars have dashboard cams. Hell, if you walk anywhere in a big urban area these days? You get non-consentually photographed all the time!
That’s why I suspect that the real problem isn’t that these ladies are being photographed. The problem is that they don’t want to see people do it.
What’s also silly is that this kind of complaint is undone by its own premises.
If it is true that naked breasts in public should be treated as banal, as no different from shirtless men jogging in the park, then what’s wrong with taking pictures of joggers in the park? It’s banal, remember?
Furthermore, it’s already been said that there is no law against going topless in public in the state of Maine, so there is no risk of arrest. The police are protecting the participants. There is nothing untoward apparent in the video. There are no institutional barriers to break-down. No injustice to be reformed. There are no fire-hoses or tear-gas. Selma, Alabama it most certainly is not. The only beef is that some people might… snap photos?
It sounds as if a free and tolerant society is mostly acting pretty much as it ought to, really. What’s the beef?
The participants deserve a salute. If you really wish to go topless down Main Street, boobs a-flopping? Go nuts! Go right ahead. By all means. But don’t forget: this same freedom means that I can look down at them and admire them and, yes, even photograph them.
Hell, I might even want to sketch them on an artists’ pad with chunks of soft charcoal.
Preferably, I’d do that from a lawn chair while wearing an orange Hawaiian t-shirt and a floppy straw hat with zinc sun-cream dabbed on my nose. While taking crunchy bites out of a roast-beef hoagie with Hostess potato chips peeking-out from its edges while pausing to suck Bacardi through a straw from a hollowed-out pineapple.
And if you want to take pictures of me doing that? Knock yourself out.
I’m going to go drive to my parents house right now to visit my mom, I hope everyone out there gets a chance to visit your mom/son/daughter today too!