Many of the links in this article are not suitable for young readers. I have included them to represent my sources accurately.
Before I begin, I would like to answer a couple of complaints I’ve heard people make for the reasons people are not comfortable with women going topless in public.
Ultimately, the reason legislation changes so slowly are because of the numerous checks and balances within even the state governments of the USA. From a philosophic standpoint, the reason these checks and balances exists is to keep knee-jerk reactions from turning into laws that would harm the public rather than aid it. Marching in a protest in and of itself will not make a law pass any faster if there is still a representative, on behalf of his people, who opposes the law. Until those people change their minds, and the representative follows suit, then the process of putting a law on the books can continue smoothly.
If you are of the opinion that the reason there are still laws against women going topless is because there is an elite patriarchy still trying to keep women in check by restricting what they can wear, I ask you this; in a world where men rule with absolute power and believe women’s bodies are merely theirs for the taking if they choose, does it make sense for them to command women to cover up their bodies and make it harder for them to judge whether or not they want to entertain themselves with their respective bodies?
From a more grounded standpoint, do you think the men of our culture, most of whom have an addiction to pornography in some way, shape, or form, want you to cover up? Young women are more and more unhappy with boys who ask them for explicit pictures of themselves. If no young women covered up, there would be no demand from boys.
As to the origins of the movement, here is who you have to thank.
The organization Gotopless was founded in 2007 by Rael, the spiritual teacher of Raelism. Rael’s name means “messenger of the elohim” according to wikipedia. To give some quick history, before his name was Rael, his name was Claude Vorilhon. While on a hiking trip, Vorilhon saw a flying saucer, from which he had his first encounter with an alien race called the Elohim, who look human in appearance. You can see more details about his encounter here.
In his book, Intelligent Design- Message from the Designers, Rael writes the proper way to conduct several meditations. Two of them, Sensual Education and Sensual Meditation, involve sexual acts. As a result, Raelians have been fighting for the right to observe their religion in public. For women, this means having the right to go topless in observance of religion.
“But what about the movie Free the Nipple?”
Free the Nipple was a movie that came out in 2014, seven years after Gotopless was founded. It launched the Free the Nipple movement, but this was after the release of the film. Free The Nipple draws their roots to Alice Paul, who wrote the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, but her focus in writing the Equal Rights Amendment was equal pay, not equal bodily exposure.
I’m not saying that all the women who march in the Go Topless Day marches are Raelians, I’m saying the origins of the topfreedom movement is religious in nature, not secular.
