The prohibition on public exposure of breasts by women and girls over 10 years old is now gone from the city code as of this week.
I never thought I'd be conflicted on this, because I am absolutely of the opinion that female breasts and nipples shouldn't be treated as exclusively sexual body parts, especially since men have them too and we aren't held to that standard.
But being confronted with the idea that 10-17 year old girls can now bare their breasts in public without restraint reminds me that treating female bodies as non-sexual is great as an ethos, but it is not reflective of reality, and that this specifically could be problematic.
But how to solve it? You can't make it an 18+ only rule, or you're further entrenching the idea that female breasts are exclusively sexual and adult, but if you let teens and tweens go topless, they will be sexualized / ogled / photographed by adult men, and that's a bad precedent to set as acceptable. We usually treat photographs of underage female breasts as a form of CSAM, but can we still say that if we're treating female breasts as non-sexual? This is an interesting new line to draw, given societal attitudes on adolescent nudity.
Regretfully, I believe that the true problem is men. The reason women have to cover their breasts is because they have to protect themselves from men. I'm all for bodily liberation and the de-sexualization of female existence, but we need an overhaul on our society's attitudes towards women in general if we're going to get there. Maybe bare breasts help get us there. Maybe girls need to learn the right way how to kick a man in the balls before they go topless.