So can we quit it with the boob puns already? Since I began reading about last weekend’s topless march in Vancouver, I think I’ve seen just about every nudity-based pun imaginable.
Last Sunday, more than 50 women marched topless through downtown Vancouver (joined by approximately 30 men wearing bras) to draw attention to double standards in our society when it comes to male and female nudity. It was a positive, friendly event and generated lots of laughs and smiles, judging from the photos — but the women and men of GoTopless were also making an important point about inequality.
Most of the coverage of the event, however, has been of the cheeky variety, which was awkwardly amusing the first time, and thence progressed to tacky and gross. Yeah, OK, the women involved did seem to have a sense of humour about the whole thing (I don’t think you can be brave enough to march in defiance of social conventions about nudity without a sense of humour) but there’s something icky about seeing breast pun after breast pun trotted out like world-class wit when people are trying to talk about inequality.
Humour is great and all, but I’m not sure that boob jokes are the best way to go here.
(The accompanying photos are all craftily framed, with women’s nipples carefully blocked out by nearby objects or blurred by distance. Nipples are always the magic line in situations like this: Somehow, the useful part of the breast is where indecency begins. For some reason. Except male nipples, of course. Those are fine. For some reason, anyway.)
It’s telling that we can’t begin to have a conversation about double standards without someone snickering, “Heh, boobs.”
I don’t think this is just me being humourless. In fact, scratch that — I’m not humourless. I have snickered — nay, chortled — at many an Eddie Izzard pun. It’s just that it seems obvious that in this case, we’re laughing to cover up what would otherwise be an awkward silence.
Women in Canada have the right to go topless, and have had since 1996, but we don’t. Why not?
There are huge social ramifications for a woman who chooses to go topless on a hot day. These negatives are often enough to prevent her from doing so, regardless of whether or not she has the right to.
Indeed, a recent CBC article refers to Lori Welbourne, a Kelowna-based blogger, as “flashing” Mayor Walter Gray in a recent interview, but that’s inaccurate. “Flashing” is when you reveal yourself in public to violate standards of propriety and therefore shock. A woman removing her shirt to discuss double standards about nudity isn’t the same. It’s not intended to simply shock, it’s intended to criticize that shock.
A woman’s toplessness is invariably understood as sexual; she’s interpreted as sexually available or sexually aggressive in a way that endangers or stigmatizes her, though she isn’t violating any law.
These aren’t small concerns. We live in a world where a Facebook photo can bar you from job opportunities, and where a woman’s (or even a child’s) “sluttiness” can be used to argue that she wasn’t “legitimately” raped.
So we have a law, but also a double standard, which we see every time we read a headline about the women in Vancouver “making a clean breast of things” or “revealing our double standards.” (“Men wearing bras to show support” is also terrible.)
The right to go topless is one of those feminist issues that I, as a feminist, often shy away from. Theoretically, I understand why it’s important — inequality is inequality and should never go unchecked. I’m sure if it were actually illegal for women to go topless in B.C., I’d write a very impassioned column about it. But since it’s legal, there’s something else standing in my way.
Because I, like most of us, have deeply, deeply internalized the idea that women’s bodies are inherently sexual in a way that men’s are not. Intellectually, I reject this idea, but there are other forces at work here, and the only way to address them is to talk about why we treat women’s bodies differently from men’s, and why we view women’s nudity as simultaneously shameful and sexual, while we view men’s nudity as neutral and natural.
That’s a hard conversation, and the “tee-hee-hee boobs” style of commentary has shown us that we’re further away from equality on this score than we were 17 years ago.
