Toronto Star Article: Guelph Feminists Go Topless But Still Struggle With Misogyny Of Men.
Topless in Guelph: Legal and loving it
Andrea Crinklaw, one of the organizers of the Top Freedom Day of Pride gets her body painted in downtown Guelph Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010. The event to celebrate women’s right to go topless drew about 25 participants and many more onlookers.
TONY SAXON/THE CANADIAN PRESS
GUELPH — Women were busting out their breasts in downtown Guelph Saturday for a festival that encourages women to be comfortable without their tops on in the same places where men roam shirtless.
About 50 observers — mostly male — sat in brilliant sunshine in St. George’s Square Saturday afternoon and waited for the event to begin.
Organizers Andrea Crinklaw and Lindsay Webb, both University of Guelph students, were among the first to peel off their tops in what started out as a shy event. Only a handful of women took their shirts off in the first hour.
The people with cameras and dark glasses may have had something to do with it.
“If you are here just to see boobs and be creepy, we encourage you to move on,” Webb told the crowd.
“We want to have a safe space here for women to exercise their right to be top free,” co-organizer Andrea Crinklaw said. “So here it is!”
“Women, we want you to be empowered. Men, we want you to be supportive. And everybody, be respectful,” Crinklaw said.
Cheers, applause and a few cat calls followed.
Cynthia Bragg, 64, sat at a table under the shade of an umbrella, considering whether to remove her shirt. She said she thought about participating in the event but fell shy when she saw the hordes of gawkers — many with cameras.
“What I don’t like is what the men are going to do with the photographs they’re taking,” she said.
“Notice that a lot of the guys are wearing sunglasses that cover their eyes?” she said with a raised eyebrow. “If you’re going to gawk, why don’t you show your face?”
The Ontario Court of Appeals made it legal for women to be shirt-free in 1996 when it overturned a charge against Gwen Jacob, a University of Guelph student who was arrested for being topless in public.
Crinklaw and Webb say women may have won the legal freedom to be topless in public, but they don’t have the social freedom. They want their event to help desensitize the masses to the female breast.
“If it could be like in Europe where women are able to be top-free on the beaches or roller blade down the street without a shirt and people aren’t appalled by it — that would be amazing,” Crinklaw said.
Live music and professional body painters helped to ease the crowd out of its initial awkwardness. By late afternoon a few dozen men and women were dancing, laughing and mingling — all naked from the waist up.
Phil Longstaff, 50, sat shirtless in the square, his chest painted with bright balloons.
He said he doesn’t understand why women’s breasts are still so highly sexualized by society.
“We got over ankles,” he said. “Why can’t we get over breasts?”
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