Men’s Rights activists have to stretch a bit to find new things to get mad about. Right now Men’s Rights Redditors are working themselves into a tizzy because a city in Colorado made it legal for women and girls to go topless.
In 2019.
You see, back in those halcyon days before COVID, the city of Fort Collins, Colorado decided that it wasn’t worth the time or the money to defend a city ordinance forbidding women from exposing their boobs in public.
Now, more than two years later some doofus on the Men’s Rights subreddit named Zogins, who only just heard the news, is warning his fellow MRAs that
Radical feminism is a disease, a rot. A group of women fought for the ‘right’ to be topless like men. So now girls aged 11 and over have the ‘right’ to walk about topless.
I can’t even imagine the number of criminal charges against men for being pedophiles and pervs in the near future.
Zogins found the story on a clickbaity trash site that basically plagiarized an NBC News article on the subject from September 2019 and treated it like it was new news in 2022. He never bothered to track the story to its source. Had he bothered to google “Fort Collins Topless” he would have discovered that the city wasn’t overrun with topless women and girls, and that men were not being arrested en masse (or even en one) for looking at them.
Nonetheless, Zogins has convinced a good number of his fellow MRAs that this is somehow a live issue and a sign of invidious discrimination against men. Indeed, his post has 420 upvotes, making it the top (non-stickied) post in the subreddit right now. Its also inspired nearly 300 comments. MRAs love to get worked up about entirely hypothetical problems.
True, quite a few commenters brush off the “news,” saying that they’re not worried about a tsunami of toplessness. Or that they would welcome something like that. “Looks like I’m moving to Colorado,” one commenter writes.
One big worry of the commenters is the possibility of seeing an ugly woman’s possibly ugly boobs.
“The ones who are desperate enough to go topless are not the kind of women us men would want to see go topless,” writesThrowAway640KB. “I mean, some guys are thirsty enough that anything goes, even decades older or hideously ugly. But still.”
Modsarebrainstems adds,
The day that became legal, my apartment caretaker managed to make the front page news in Ottawa. … The caretaker decided to vacuum the halls topless. Imagine Barbie on fat steroids, coked up and an extra 30 years.
Others detail their plans to thwart the hypothetical topless menace.
Gamernator-GX writes
A bunch of middle-aged, fat, ugly, butch-haircut feminists going topless isn’t my idea of eye candy. I’d look away quickly and say, “Lady, put your guns away. This is California. Open carry is not legal.” If they’re gonna play that entitled liberal game, I will too, by using their own rules against them. I’ll complain like a Karen and say i was offended, sexually harassed, and since nudity was exposed to my children, she’s a syxual pridator. I’d smile as she’s handcuffed and put in the paddy wagon. Then at court, I’ll cry like a 5 year old girl and say, “Then she looked at me, and I feared she was gonna rape me! I escaped with my life! I’ll never get over this trauma!” Since feminists want to be men (while hating men at the same time makes it so much funnier), she’s not given the womans sentence for sexual harrassment of 4 months, she given the men’s sentence of 40 years. Having enough women like her in prison is a guarantee that our nation’s worst offenders will never die in a flood.
These guys sure have vivid imaginations.
Zogins, the OP, reports that he actually has tried to get topless women arrested before. “In my country,” he notes,
[w]omen are not allowed to be topless even on a beach.
Many women ignore this rule and they sunbathe and swim topless. The police do nothing. …
I was on a beach with a young relative and two women sat down next to us and took off their tops. I felt a little uncomfortable because I was with a young boy and we both did not know where to look. I decided to try an experiment. I phoned the police hotline for reporting crimes and told the female police officer who replied of the two women who were breaking the law next to me. I gave her the name of the beach and directions. She started trying to be funny “It’s a very hot day today. I think they are feeling hot.” But I asked her what she was going to do seeing that the law was being broken right next to me. She told me that she would send a police car. None came.
Poor baby.
Still others work themselves into a lather over a hypothetical epidemic of women grabbing men”s chests. “They do anything that they want without repercussions or correction,” complains stupuff.
Next time a woman touches your chest or anything you didn’t give permission for, call them out. Make them feel scummy for taking license with your body because you’re a man.
Either we all follow the rules or no one does.
Somehow I doubt that women are regularly grabbing this guy’s chest. Or is there really an epidemic of chest-groping going on that I’m not aware of?
A few commenters think this whole thread is as dumb as I think it is.
“This is honestly one of the stupidest posts ive ever seen on here,” complains Skydiver860, “and is an example of posts on here that give people the wrong idea and think we are the bad people.”
Skydiver860, I certainly appreciate you calling out this post. But there are posts as dumb as this up pretty much every day on the Men’s Rights subreddit. If you don’t believe me, just watch.
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So they will happily try to police other people’s bodies and self-presentation?
And they will try to blame women for men being unable to be creeps?
Such oppression.
Always amused when I see that picture. Since that is a portait of Gabrielle d’Estrées and one of her sisters. Gabrielle was one of the more famous mistresses of Henri IV of France.
I don’t think they get the difference between looking (which happens all the time, even without nudity) and leering. Even with leering, people tend to be a bit on the lenient side unless you’re really obvious and gross about it. This is far from the first time I’ve seen someone claim that women being barechested in public is some sort of prison trap. Which says more about them than anything else. I’ve been various environments where nudity is prevalent (World Naked Bike Ride, Nude Beaches, Sex Parties, and was topfree at a Pride Festival once) and most men know to behave themselves even when there’s no meaningful policing. Hell, even most of my clients when I was a sex worker weren’t the leer-y sort.
As for seeing “unattractive” women’s bodies? People, particularly women, complained a lot about obese men in speedos during the 1980s (which was just as wrong back then as it is now), but outside of a tiny number of diehard prudes they got over it. You can get over this too… unless you’re a diehard prude yourself, in which case tough noodles.
Of course you were there. And of course you were there with a young relative. And these topless women blocked the view of the ocean and the volleyball players and even the sky. It was so awful that you were rooted to the spot. So unfortunately, you couldn’t just get up and move your asses.
I live near the Castro district in San Francisco, world famous as a gay neighborhood. Two or three guys occasionally walk around naked or nearly naked. I don’t bother to call a cop. I avert my eyes. Trauma avoided. Although I will admit to some snarkiness, owing to the fact that they stage this performance only on warm days with blue skies. Sunshine performance artists: they refuse to suffer for their art.
Yikes, I hate to ever be seen to agree with one of these fellows but about this only, I have to agree. If this is really happening, these assaulting women should be made to feel scummy and be reported to the police.
I just have a lot of trouble believing that there is an epidemic of women assaulting them and think it’s entirely likely that the problem goes the other way.
@ big titty demon
I must confess I personally have a slightly different take on this. Now of course, this comes with the obvious caveat that this is just my own thoughts on my own experiences. I totally understand other people may have a different approach and their experiences and responses are completely valid too.
Now I don’t want to suggest I have hordes of ladies unable to resist me. But there have been quite a few occasions where people have got a bit grabby. For example I used to regularly get a train from Stanstead Airport on a Friday evening. There’s a lot of Irish hen parties on that service. So when I’d walk through the carriage I would get giggly colleens grabbing my arse.
But to be honest, I’d feel churlish making a fuss about that. So I’d just jokingly make my excuses. And I have had my bits grabbed a few times whilst out an about of an evening.
But to me it’s all about context. Whilst theoretically there’s no difference between men touching women and women touching men, in practice they can be different. That’s my personal approach anyhow. Like I say other people have equally valid opposing views.
But unlike men approaching women, there’s no underlying potential threat. No-one is going to threaten me or harm me if I decline their advances. They’re not even really advances anyway. It’s just high spirits rather than a serious prelude to anything further. I guess fundamentally it’s that there’s no sense of menace; unlike in the opposite situation.
I think it’s reflected in that saying ‘A man alone in a group of women is delighted. A woman alone in a group of men is terrified.’
And I certainly don’t want to get into that idea that men should just see unwanted approaches as a compliment or that men who have been assaulted should consider themselves lucky. If you don’t consent then feeling angered or violated is perfectly valid and appropriate.
But we all react differently. If someone does comment favourably on my body and say touches my arm or chest, then I do actually feel flattered. Although I mainly work out for practical reasons, there is obviously an aesthetic element to that too, and I can’t pretend to be upset if people notice.
I hope that makes some sense. Like I stress; no reaction is invalid, and other people may quite reasonably take a different view. But it’s just to explain why I, personally, aren’t bothered by such things, and, when it is done to me, I find it harmless and just the women having a bit of fun.
But just to make clear, I don’t think there’s an innate difference, but the societal background, the power dynamics, the actual threat level etc. Well, they all, to me, make a practical difference.
But again just to make clear, this is my own reaction to people touching me. I fully support people taking a different approach with people touching them.
Hmmmmm… I have only been groped by various coworkers. Mostly men engaged in horseplay, though one woman I worked with was very sleezy about it and did it quite a bit. Incidentally, she was the only one I knew who had gotten in trouble with HR for that kind of thing. She had scared a guy into quitting because of how she kept harassing him.
I didn’t mind much, any attention is good attention, and I never felt threatened that I was going to get anything more than a quick squeeze and “suggestions.” Obviously, as several of you said, there can be significant differences depending on who does it to who and how they go about it. These are all people I knew and had some level of trusted interaction with before anything ever happened.
That being said, I would find someone who was exposing themselves in public to be a concern mainly because that is not normal for our society and for better or worse, such things can be giant red flags. That is more the issue than anything else really. People behaving oddly in public can be cause for alarm and if nudity is odd, then there ya go.
Vaguely related to that, I’ve had homeless people on the street want to shake my hand and go in for the hug when confronting them for harassing customers for money, and that always made me leery that they were going to try to pick pocket me or start something from there, but no one ever did. (People been assaulted, stabbed, shot and killed in that neighborhood, so I don’t feel I was being overly paranoid by being alert or refusing them.)
As someone who likes a good 20 ft of personal space as often as possible, any touching is undesirable touching.
Some invasions of the personal space bubble must be tolerated because I live in a society, but no matter who it is, I’m not going to be super happy about someone doing more than an incidental brush past or a “emergency support so’s I don’t fall on my face” grab.
There is a difference between “This person is going to hurt me if I ask them to back off” and “This person is having fun, wants me to have fun with them, and has forgotten that random strangers who hate contact and do not want to have fun with them exist”
It’s in how the grabby person wants you to react, I think. Does the grabby person want you to feel happy/flattered? Or do they not even care how you feel because you’re mobile meat? Or do they want you to feel uncomfortable or scared?
Only one of those motivations is a thing I can tolerate without being ‘Haha NOPE it is time to have words this is NOPE’
Around here it’s legal to walk the streets naked if you really want to. Hardly anyone does, for climate as well as social reasons, but it’s never been illegal afaict. Certainly not in my lifetime. I expect that Colorado is going to have even more of the climate issue, it gets bastard cold up the mountains.
going topless at the beach/lake/river/park has been a long standing german tradition.
american exchange student that worked at my dad’s office in the early 80s was VERY astounded by the young women playing volleyball topless at the lake.
i’ll never go topless outside because i am glow in the dark white and burn in about five seconds.
but since i had the mastectomy i love going topless in my own flat. before there was too much boobsweat
I thnk contrapangloss and Alan have both hit an important nail squarely on the unpointy end; what makes the difference is both the likelihood of putting – and the intent to put – the recipient of the uninvited attentions in an uncomfortable situation at best, and at worst in fear for their safety and their life.
So it’s not an absolute divide by the sex of who’s doing the touching/getting touched; it’s just that the power imbalance in patriarchal societies typically has a very very strong correlation 🙁
(and of course as a minor point this makes a mess of flirtation, which obviously can only be enjoyed if one is not in danger (social as well as physical), which in turn just underscores the point we all know about harrassment having nothing to do with actual compliments)
Yes, our prisons are overrun with innocent men sentenced to 40 years for harassment. That is definitely A Thing.
Wow this is appropriate, though slightly off topic…
… I just got scheduled for my top surgery to happen in a little over a week and I am so. SO. EXCITED. Bye bye boobs!
Less off topic.. some of these guys, I have to wonder if they’re even straight, or just how much their pretense of morality overrides that blend of human curiosity and sexuality.
I’m bi and I would welcome the opportunity to gaze and admire non creepily from afar. Boobs have great aesthetic (when they’re not attached to me). I bet some women would be happy to bare even more if they felt safe to do it.
Congratulations, Seth!
I’ll cross my fingers for a swift recovery for you, once you get some weight off your chest.
@Alan, .45, contrapgloss
I see your points, definitely. I phrased it as “assaulting women” on purpose, because there is a huge difference between a person making an advance which involves touch and an assault. Even an incel is entitled to say no touch is welcome, and a woman should be able to pick up on it and respect it.
I have personally myself been very flattered by men touching me and saying things in situations that would, all things considered, probably be able to be construed as sexual harassment if I so chose. It was because I felt no threat, I knew those men respected me, and I knew they would carry it no further.
Contrast that to a situation which I reported to HR and carried the full distance which was theoretically only to ask me out for a drink.
That’s because it was a man who made it abundantly clear that he could make or break my career, that he had oodles more power than me, an intern, as a project director, that he had not listened to me at all (a strong clue was the racist mispronunciation of my direct supervisor in order to say that he worked just down the hall from him–which he definitely didn’t, but how was I to determine in the moment he asked [except, you know, that he couldn’t even say his name]), and there was of course the context of the ask implying that I would then go to his hotel after. When discussing it with other women later for my own saftey (reporting it to my team leads in case anything further came of it), I found out I was (of course) not the only person he ever asked.
But he never touched me, that guy, and to date is the only person I ever took up to HR, because he is the only person I ever felt threatened by. (Well, in a work context where HR would do anything about it, anyway. Hella not the only guy that ever threatened me, career-wise or physically. The police are no help on sexual assaults, let me tell you.)
The amount of cultural backlash men would face if they dared speak up about the likely wave of bare-chested baristas who dip their nips into the coffee would convince onlookers from another planet that we are a deranged species best left alone and uncontacted. This isn’t just about men being trapped into staring at these women’s lovebags, its about all the sort of chicanery one who understands the feminine thought process knows that women will get up to if they’re allowed to flash men in public. This is some real groomer level shit, believe me.
Can you imagine the amount of women who won’t be getting speeding tickets because their gazongas have so distracted the police that they are unable to follow through with their duties and do theoir jabs? Suppose that civil unrest were to occur and female protestors decide to scream and rant in the nude, further endangering the public as police who do their jobs and apprehend these bags get accuse of inappropriate contact with them? Nudity is another tool in women’s bag of tricks to usurp control of society and lower the status of beleaguered men.
Should I be allowed to flash my cock or my ass at people in public? I guarantee it, women would call you a pervert if you did any of that, and rightly so. This just proves that without a strictly enforced dress code, women push the envelope until there’s no standard anymore. What this topless twits really want is societal collapse.
@Quack:
Utter hogwash. Fractally wrong, besides. Let’s see, we have gender essentialism, multiple slippery-slope type arguments, viewing a group as monolithic in intentions, etc., etc. … and what’s at the bottoms of those slippery slopes? Societal collapse, Earth not getting invited to join the Great Galactic Federation, and people getting out of paying parking tickets, was it?
<smh>
Victorians thought women showing too much ankle would somehow bring about societal collapse. Obviously, they were wrong. Nudist colonies are evidence that no amount of shrinkage of the required amount of clothing when out in public will actually bring about societal collapse. Which is hardly surprising, since we had to develop society before we developed clothing, which has complex enough manufacture to pretty much require division and specialization of labor, after all. The benefit of clothing wasn’t some mysterious wellspring of societal stability; it was the ability to expand our range into cooler-climate regions of the planet, and eventually (shoes and gloves and such, sturdy and sometimes with cleats and suchlike) to move on nastier terrain and increase our abilities in the area of tool use. (The thus-far apex of that being the space suit, with which it’s possible to do repairs to the outside of a space station while still being able to breathe!)
@Squack
You have a VERY low opinion of men. Do you know that?
@Makroth
That’s the thing, as much as Squack is a Misogynist (and a considerably big and childish one at that): he is also, ironically, seems to hold men is a fairly Misandrist regard.Far more than he would ever likely accuse women or feminsits of ever being.
I have observed in my life that their is no bigger Misandrist: than a Misogynist.
@Squack:
Poor thing. Would you like a fainting couch?
What’s it like to be so fragile that you feel this threatened by the sight of wild female nipnops?
How do you justify being so fascist that you want to dictate what people wear instead of saying “If I don’t like it I don’t have to look”, like a real freedom lover who respects the freedoms of others, and put the responsibility for male behavior where it belongs – on men as individuals?
Is society really worth saving if it truly can be brought to its knees by public boobage?
How can men lay legitimate claim to social power if we’re so weak we can be toppled by titties? You really think someone that weak deserves to rule? lmao
Most importantly, groomer is a specific term that refers to a pedophile who is preparing children for sexual activity. It does not mean “anything I don’t like”. You failed to establish how adult women showing nipples prepares children for sexual activity, especially when anybody with a brain knows that a child’s most recent experience with nipples was probably that they provide food, given that that’s their main purpose in mammals. I expect a child who sees these women might feel inexplicably hungry at most. Fun fact: men generally can lactate too, given the right stimuli.
Plumbers flash their asses all the time and nobody cares.
As for flashing your cock, last time I checked, those don’t provide milk to babies and if you stick it in a baby’s mouth we’re going to have SERIOUS PROBLEMS, you and I.
There are a lot of months in the year when you don’t wanna go topless in Fort Collins. It’s below zero F in winter on the regular. Your nips would break right off. Can get mighty hot in the summer, though, so shirtless could be good as long as you’ve got plenty of sunscreen — that thin mountain air lets UV through easier.
Meanwhile, since nobody’s been arrested in the last 3 years, I doubt it’s a problem.
Avert your eyes, boys — and probably very few people want to see most of you shirtless either.
I bet women with hot flashes would appreciate this law!
Full nude swimming is the best, I find — you don’t get that SHLORK as the wet swimsuit sticks to your ass. Y’all know what I mean.
@BTD: I too have been, let’s face it, groped and had comments of a generally held to be inappropriate nature made at me. And I did that right back, and it was only in the presence of other people… because he and I did mad flirtation. We just clicked. If I hadn’t been married and he hadn’t been married (both for years), well, maybe probably. But that was our thing when we saw each other every few months. It was fun. I’d have slapped most people.
@Seth S: So excited for you! I’ve known a number of people who got top surgery (or just reduction) and every one of them has been so happy. Follow your post-op instructions to the letter, young man.
@Squack
Why would baristas be dunking their breasts in boiling hot coffee?
First of all, ouch.
Second of all, do you ever see male baristas? Are they frequently topless? It’s legal for men to go shirtless, right? So why don’t they have their nips out at work, ready to dip into coffee? Beyond the fact that ouch.
Ah, yes, the right’s new favourite word to sling around. This term, which properly refers to the way that predatory adults condition children so that they can get access to them and sexually abuse them,* has lately been thrown around as a slur against LGBTQ+ people just for existing as well as any adult who will treat LGBTQ+ children with kindness and respect.
In your case, though, you seem to think topless women would be grooming… adult men? You and your buddies are really trying to make that word lose all useful meaning, aren’t you?
No, you shouldn’t. But have you heard the news? Women also have butts, and we also have genitals. Neither are attached to our chests.
*I’m not a child psychologist or anything, so my apologies if this definition is lacking.
Squack squawked:
If a cop can be distracted from writing a ticket because of a pair of breasts, the cop should probably also avoid walking and chewing gum at the same time.
Seriously, this is not that much different from saying that OB/GYNs are rapists in the making because they’re examining vulvas and vaginas on a regular basis. (I of course acknowledge that a certain percentage of doctors – of all specialties – have been inappropriate with their patients. I used to work at the same hospital as one, and was unsurprised when he was arrested. A person who habitually leaves a mess in the break room is not someone who respects other people.)
It is totally possible to see a naked person and not assault them. That’s utterly aside from the fact that not everybody would be aroused by a set of bare breasts.