According to this story in the Guardian, French women are not going topless at the beach anymore. How one measures this is unsaid, but the young researchers sent off to the beach to count bare boobies probably enjoyed their work.

Is topless sunbathing over? It certainly is in France, according to French Elle, if the coverline on its new summer issue is to be believed: “La Fin Du Topless Sur La Plage?” – which translates, verbatim, to “Is this the end of toplessness on the beach?”

According to the magazine the answer is “yes”, and the reasons are threefold. First, an increased concern over health and the dangers of skin cancer; second, the “pornified” perception of topless women (indeed Elle suggests the death of the monokini – ie swimming briefs – was linked to the idea that topless women are seen as “loose”); and third, the rise of breast-affiliated activism – chiefly Femen, who use their naked breasts as a means of attracting attention to various causes, and Free the Nipple, a recent campaign that encourages women to go topless to end the stigma surrounding female bodies. “Topless sunbathing was seen by women as a new freedom in St Tropez in the 1960s,” says Elle. And now that they’re covering up? It’s a “worrying sign of a regression in the place of women”.

The skin cancer excuse makes some sense. Maybe people are doing less sunbathing than in the past. Too much time in the sun, especially just lying around, tends to make the skin look old. In our youth obsessed culture, that’s not good.  Alternatively, the women may be lying. In the age of feminism, not offending the homely girls is the most important thing, so maybe the homely girls are now opposed to this.

The “pornified” angle is interesting. The West is becoming more uptight regarding fun stuff like sex and looking at naked ladies. Drugs, boozing, sex, eating, smoking and jokes about minorities have been ruled off-limits to some degree. The sort of women going to St Tropez probably think it is horrible to look like a girl now. Of course, in a world with unlimited porn at your fingertips, women showing their lady parts off in public is no longer much of a statement.

The last one is the puzzler. What in the world is “femen”? It turns out to be naked protesting. This line from the Wikipedia entry is amusing:

The organisation describes itself as “fighting patriarchy in its three manifestations – sexual exploitation of women, dictatorship and religion”^[12] and has stated that its goal is “sextremism serving to protect women’s rights”

This is what passes for feminism these days. They call it Third Wave Feminism. Again, from Wikipedia:

Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid what it deems the second wave’s essentialist definitions of femininity, which often assumed a universal female identity that over-emphasized the experiences of upper-middle-class white women. The shift from second wave feminism came about with many of the legal and institutional rights that were extended to women. In addition to these institutional gains, third-wave feminists believed there needed to be further changes in stereotypes, media portrayals, and language to define women. Third-wave ideology focuses on a more post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality.^[3] In “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Joan W. Scott describes how language has been used as a way to understand the world, however, “post-structuralists insist that words and texts have no fixed or intrinsic meanings, that there is no transparent or self-evident relationship between them and either ideas or things, no basic or ultimate correspondence between language and the world”^[4] Thus, while language has been used to create binaries (such as male/female), post-structuralists see these binaries as artificial constructs created to maintain the power of dominant groups.

Got that?

The simpler definition is we have upper-middle class white women at universities with way too much time on their hands. No one takes their courses or cares about what they have to say, so they make a nuisance of themselves chasing the white eunuchs around the faculty lounge, calling them racists.

One last bit from the story:

Alice Pfeiffer, a 29-year-old Anglo-French journalist (who, incidentally does sunbathe topless in Biarritz, Guéthary, Monaco and surfing resort Hossegor), thinks the decline is inextricably linked to social media: “Young women in their 20s do it less because they are aware that … you can end up topless on your own Facebook wall.”

Pfeiffer blames “pop-porn culture – Miley Cyrus to American Apparel, ie aggressive naked imagery of young girls” – for the shift in perception of going topless.

It is one of the great ironies of the technological revolution. The old line about having 57 channels, yet nothing good is on TV. All of this technology that was supposed to free us from our chains is doing the opposite. Whip off your top on vacation and you end up getting fired because your boss saw your boobies on Facebook. With cameras everywhere, ready to publicize your moment of indiscretion, everyone has to stop having fun and no one gets to see boobies on the beach.