Why I Walk Bare-Chested “Where Men Don’t.”

Ocean City, Maryland, Summer 2016. One of the more common objections I hear to my bare-chested outings is to ask why I do so where men aren’t going bare-chested. The simple answer is that I don’t. Male bare-chestedness has become so normal we don’t see it anymore.  So for the last year I’ve been taking photos of bare-chested men in public places, often while I’m also bare-chested.

 

I’ve been having a long conversation with an Icelandic woman on YouTube objecting to my public bare-chested outings, specifically my walks and rides in city centers.  She says the beach is one thing, but her feeling is that outside of beaches such behavior is not proper.  During our conversation she asked me a couple times why I walk bare-chested where men aren’t bare-chested, which has had the positive effect of prompting me to finally write this blog post after a year in the making.

The simplest answer of course is that I don’t walk bare-chested where men aren’t going bare-chested.  Men are going bare-chested all over the place.  It’s just so normal we don’t even register it any more.

Local Skatepark, Summer 2016. Parents and children frequent this city-owned facility and it is perfectly visible in the middle of a neighborhood. It is also about 200 yards from a school and borders a busy road.

Local Skatepark, Summer 2016. I watched this guy skate for 20 minutes. No parents objected. No police arrived. No one besides me snuck pictures, as happens sometimes to me when I walk. No one cared that he was bare-chested, well-muscled, blond, tan and glistening in sweat.  In other words, he was very sexy and attractive and bare-chested.  No one objected. 

 

Saying simply that men do go bare-chested is not a complete or satisfactory answer though.  My visceral reaction to this question goes deeper than just pointing out that men do in fact go bare-chested with ease and regularity.  It is to point out that allowing women to do a thing only if men are already doing that thing is still giving men the power over women’s bodies.  The only just way to address issues of freedom is to give everyone the same freedom and let each individual choose how to use it.

 

YMCA Outdoor Pool, Summer 2016.  This is a beautiful breast, if you ask me.  Nice round shape, full, smooth skin tone, nice movement when walking.  I enjoyed watching!

YMCA Pool, Summer 2016. One of the arguments people use against female bare-chestedness is that women and men are “biologically” different.  Are we really so different?  None of the parents of these children seem to mind these impressive breasts swaying around in the pool where their children can see them. No YMCA staff asked this patron to exit the pool or cover up. No police arrived.

YMCA Pool, Summer 2016. Even in the presence of this obvious breast tissue and bare nipples, these moms laughed with their children and enjoyed their afternoon. No one asked this person to cover up.

 

Another objection I hear from time to time is that women and men are inherently different, biologically, psychologically and physically.  Meaning I guess that equality is impossible.  There also often follows this fallacy that treating genders equally under tha law means men and women act the same way and wear the same clothes and so on.  The argument also goes on that female breasts are just seen as sexual to men and that’s how it is and always will be.  And then there’s this leap that says, since men won’t change, women just can’t enjoy the same freedoms as men.  I reject this thinking.

 

Capitol Hill, Washington D.C., July 2016. Jeff took this photo of a man riding his bicycle bare-chested up Pennsylvania Avenue at the exact same time I was elsewhere walking bare-chested up Pennsylvania Avenue with several other bare-chested women. 

 

Capitol Hill, Washington D.C., Summer 2016. He’s even running a red light!!! In traffic!!! If that’s not confidence, I don’t know what is.

 

People say seeing female breasts is harmful to children.  This is not true.  Children need breasts for nourishment and comfort.  What is harmful to children is watching their parents apply disparate standards to men and women, and making girls cover up while not making boys cover up.  Violence and hate harm children more than anything, but we don’t censor those.

 

Fall 2016. The last blog post I wrote was about local newspaper and television coverage of my bare-chested walks and bike rides.  I didn’t ask for the media attention, but when they contacted me asking for quotes, I asked them to run uncenscored and unaltered photos.  They all declined, even though female bare-chestedness is legal where I make my outings.  The day after the Daily Times (delmarvanow.com) ran their story with censored photos, they ran this photo uncensored, online and in print.

 

Words like “decent,” “proper,” and “moral” strike me now as weapon words, words used by those in power to oppress and control.  They are words steeped in subjectivity and prejudice.  Who decides what is proper and over whom do they wield this standard?  What is the penalty for violating this standard?  To me it is another way of saying a person has deviated from the norm, behaved atypically, or strayed from the herd, whether it was by doing backflips through the mall or demanding racial equality and justice.  There are people who are just inherently threatened by people doing their own thing.

 

My hometown, summer 2016. This man spent the day working bare-chested, going in and out of the construction site in a professional office building with many occupied units.

 

Art Show, Art Stroll, Summer 2016. This man spent an hour bare-chested inside an art show, then skated through a large outdoor crowd when he left. He had no shirt with him at all.

 

My hometown, Summer 2016. Walking the dog bare-chested. No police, no complaints, no traffic slowing.  He also has no shirt with him.  If someone asked him to cover up he could not.  But why would anyone ask him to cover up?

 

Etc, etc, etc.  I have other photographs of bare-chested men elsewhere on this blog as well.  The woman with whom I am conversing on YouTube says that female bare-chestedness looks like exhibitionism to her.  I agree.  It does look like exhibitionism to her, because she has never known it to be anything else.  But there was a time in this country when male bare-chestedness was illegal and considered indecent and exhibitionist.

Now we don’t even see it.