Women and men topless the same?

[Noir]

There hasn't been a next in europe for maybe 100 years. Nudity equating with sexual activity is a couple-hundred-year old puritan thing. Nobody has to care about seeing tits. People decide to care. It's probably MORE conservative viewpoint - to hold to how people behaved before they learned to feel shame over essentially nothing. I've had this viewpoint about the silliness of american nudity (and traffic speed) laws since way back in the 1900s...after my first tour here. I've maintained this viewpoint while studying theology; while studying church operations; while studying doctrine; while working as a pastor. Thankfully and hopefully I've passed those views on to my kids.

Spot on.

[darin]

Interesting reading on how nudity became taboo in modern society:

"New research from the University of Warwick reveals that Queens and prostitutes bared their breasts in the media of the1600s to titillate the public, and that the exposure of a single breast in portraits and prints was common in portrayals of court ladies.

he paper “Revealing Mary” analyses 17th (century) woodcuts used to illustrate over 10,000 ballads. These were the cheapest, most popular and politically charged media of the day.

McShane Jones reveals that breasts - including the breasts of the Queen herself - were commonly depicted on ballad sheets to illustrate the text. Depictions of Queen Mary II of England, wife of William of Orange, frequently show her baring her breasts. In several woodcuts (1689-1694) the ‘modest and virtuous’ Mary is represented as openly baring her breasts.

Woodcuts were deliberately chosen to target buyers and to complement the context of the ballad. Just as today's magazines often depict scantily clad women on their covers, pictures of buxom women displaying their boobs on ballads were a selling point for a male audience, and a female one, if the pictures described the latest fashions.
Diarist Samuel Pepys' collection of nearly 2000 song sheets contains more busty ballads than any other contemporary collection, and it's not hard to imagine that there was a certain preference in his ballad buying.
Images of big-breasted women similar to celebrity tabloid pin-ups have appeared in popular media for centuries. However, the woodcuts could be used to depict innocence as well as immorality. For example the same picture of a fashionably big-breasted woman in the 1650s was used in a number of different ballads to illustrate an innocent, a tempted and a fallen maiden.
Historian Angela McShane Jones from the University of Warwick said: “In the 1600s it was fairly commonplace for women to bare their breasts in public. The fashions were initiated by court members and Queens, then replicated by ordinary women, and common prostitutes. 17th century fashion, rather than demeaning women, could be empowering. The extremely low cut dresses were designed to encourage men to look but not to touch. They empowered some women to use their sexuality.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20040803...elease&id=1858


So from that perspective, traditional views on breasts-in-public shade towards "no big deal".