According to the United States Federal Court, Females Can Freely Show Their Breasts Off in Public
The history of inequality which is doled out to women is long and tedious. Patriarchy has made sure that women are never given rights equal to men. Although there has been quite a change from where we started, we still have a long way to go before we can say that the world is equal and just to both men and women. There was a time when women were considered nothing more than a machine to produce children and to look after the house. They were taken for granted by every member of the family, including the other women. Women had no right to vote or were even considered as proper humans.
Isn’t it wonderful that those dark ages are over. The really dark times for women where they were considered nothing more than their reproductive organs. When they weren’t even considered as fellow humans. Just another beast of burden for the service of man. Where the whims and interests of the man was considered the law that dictated the existence of womenfolk. It truly would be great if all these things were truly part of the past, right? Sadly, it is not so.
Women still have to live their lives according to the whims of men. Where middle school girls are sent back home to change clothes because their bare sleeves would distract the boys in class. There are countless such incidents and scenarios where you’d see that it’s the women who have to bend themselves over, so that the men don’t have any sort of discomfort whatsoever. Nobody even stops to question whether this discomfort is even real or not. It is just an unspoken law and everyone seems to follow suit without any cross-questioning at all.
In a more blatant display of this male favoritism, the municipality of Fort Collins decided to make a certain female body part as good as illegal. In 2015, they decided that a woman couldn’t be topless in public at all. Unless she was under the age of 9, or if she were a breastfeeding mother. At first glance, most would find nothing wrong with the law at all. And that is where the innate patriarchy kicks in. There is no such law barring men from baring their chest in public. So why do women have to cover themselves up modestly and men don’t?
Why are women being fined for a body part they possess, same as men. We all know that the function of a female’s breast is to feed their young ones. Other than that they are no different than a man’s breast. Both the sexes can have any types of breasts. If a woman’s breast are considered not fit to be displayed in public, then shouldn’t the same restrictions be put on the man-boobs. Because I can conjure up several cases where a guy’s chest is much worse than a girl’s.
It was for precisely this reason that the ‘free the nipple’, the activist group who are fighting for equal rights for women, contested this ruling. And in 2016 they won. The reason for their win was plain and simple. Because that law was discriminating against women. And was undoing the hard work of so many generations of equal rights activists. Because barring women from doing something that men are allowed, solely on the basis of their body is sexualization at it’s finest. This law treated women not as citizens but simply as their body parts. And therefore it had to go. The intent of a woman should say a lot more than what is perceived by others. And that’s what should matter.