Women’s Right to Go Topless? Oh, Brother!

…by Jonas E. Alexis

A few weeks ago, the Canada Press, the Toronto Star, and the National Post released a report saying:

“A rally and march organized by three sisters who were stopped by a police officer for biking topless a week ago was held Saturday in Waterloo, Ont. Dozens of topless women — and men — attended the trio’s ‘Bare With Us’ rally at Waterloo Town Square, meant to educate the public about women’s right to be topless if they so choose.

“Local media reports say people were waving placards, banners and sporting body paint with messages including ‘everyone has the right to NOT be harassed’ and ‘Bare With Us! They’re just boobs!’

“Juno-nominated musician Alysha Brilla says she and her sisters were not wearing shirts while cycling in Kitchener, Ont., on July 24 when a male officer drove up beside them and told them to cover up because it is the law.

“Brilla says he told the officer he was wrong, adding that when she started filming the interaction on her cellphone, the officer said he had only wanted to check if the women had proper bells and lights on their bicycles.”[1]

That may not be a surprise to some, but the fundamental question here is this: how did we get that far? Well, a brief historical context here.

After the sexual revolution in the 1960s, modest apparel, which was largely the norm in much of the West (remember classic movies such as Pollyanna, The King and I, Ben Hur, The Robe, etc.?), eventually became a relic of the past. Women began to scream their lungs out and started to demand their so-called rights to go topless and sometimes completely naked in public.

What actually happened was that people like Wilhelm Reich produced the sexual revolution, and their ideological children such as Elizabeth Wurtzel ended up spreading it virtually everywhere: first in books and magazines, then in movies and the entertainment industry. At the end of the day, Wurtzel, like the three sisters mentioned earlier, ended up going topless on the front cover of her book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, “while giving prospective readers the finger.”[2] Wurtzel, of course, knows the power of going topless or using sex as a form of control. She even called it “pussy power.”[3] Once that power is harnessed, Wurtzel argues, then “The Bitch Rules.”[4] (This is actually a title of one of her books.)

But “The Bitch Rules” wasn’t the norm at all in society. To a large extent, people used to dress modestly in public. In fact, those who broke the rule usually ended up spending some time in jail. Keep in mind that Jim Morison of The Doors was charged in Miami in 1969 for “indecent exposure” and for “using obscene languages.” Keep also in mind that the Ed Sullivan Show would not show Elvis Presley’s gyration from the waist down after he created a stir with songs like “Hound Dog.”

Well, fast forward to 2001 and then 2014, where the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Lady Gaga performed completely naked on stage and without getting arrested.

After more than forty years of incubation, legislators swiftly changed the law with respect to public nudity. Women wanted to go topless, and Canada officially satisfied those women’s lustful desires and unbridled passion. Now police officers are beginning to realize that those laws have gone too far precisely because they too costly.

If women are permitted to go topless in public, then by what moral law should police officers arrest Femen protesters for disrupting the Quebec culture minister’s press conference and for saying things like, “My uterus, my priority!”?[5] There is more. In 2013,

“Three women, who are part of the group FEMEN, exposed their breasts on Tuesday during Question Period to protest against the crucifix that hangs in the province’s legislature.”[6]

Femen has already created a stir in Quebec, and law makers are now wrestling with the moral implications of going topless. They seem to realize that a society cannot really exist without the moral law—and this is what Femen and other subversive groups are denying! Keep in mind that it was members of Femen who were screaming at the top of their lungs and saying: “fu$k your morals”[7] and even “fu$k Islamism.”

As Inna Shevchenko put it a few months ago,

“Our breast are talking. This is my political weapons… With our political breasts, we are shocking, irritating, frightening, inspiring… our sexuality must become politicised. We are not denying our potential to be treated as sex objects….we are taking our sexuality into our own hands…we are at war. This is an ideological war.”

This is actually where going topless will take you. And whether the three sisters like it or not, their breasts are going to “talk” to people, including impressionable children who may not know right from left. And if they want to exclude the moral law by going topless, then they are basically agreeing with Femen members. And if they agree with Femen, then they are basically saying, “fu$k your morals.”

If they want to “fu$k” everyone’s morals, then how are they going to defend things like rape and sexual assault? As we all know, the metaphysical principles against rape and sexual assault are based on the moral law! Even people like Estelle B. Freedman tell us that “Individuals needed to regulate morality themselves to achieve a virtuous society.”[8] A “virtuous society” is simply unfeasible without applying the moral law. John Adams again knew this all along.

So, do the three sisters mean to tell us that they are going to titillate men all across Canada and do not expect to get raped? Are those women that crazy?

I was talking to a student of mine (a very bright young man[9]) about a similar issue a few days. At the end of our conversation, he persuaded me to watch a video clip by David Chappelle in which this issue is raised. There are some truths here:

There is a deeper concern here. If those sisters want to ignore the moral law and vow to fulfill their carnal desire and unbridled passion by any means, what will they say to creeps like Bill Cosby, who paid off women and “invited young models to dressing room as he stood guard”?[10] What if some creeps take pictures of those sisters while they go topless and download those pictures online? What logical inference or moral law will they use to tell those creeps that they cannot do so? And by what moral principle will they defend their case? Do they mean to tell us that they can violate the moral law and creeps cannot? Who are they really kidding here?

Last year, Emily Shyre of the Daily Beast did not hesitate to write:

“More women are not only talking about their breasts, but sharing images, stories, and humor around the life-giving organs all on their own terms. From posing for post-mastectomy portrait photos to online comedy sketches about boob sweat, women are starting new dialogues about breasts that let women share their insecurities, revel in their sensuality, and laugh at the inherent silliness of having these things with nipples that drive so much of the male gaze.”[11]

Shyre moved on to say that

“Breasts are serious business, and that’s because they are serious sexual business. They have a hallowed sexual status, arguably more fetishized than either sex’s genitalia. They are the parts of the female anatomy so often the object of fantasies. Sure, derrieres are, perhaps, a close second, followed by legs.

“But, these aren’t the body parts that launched Victoria’s Secret, Baywatch, and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue—while the most recent cover marked the year of the butt, but having just three rears over 50 years speaks to the pop cultural significance of breasts…

“When people began clicking on the photos of [Jennifer] Lawrence, I doubt they were thinking of the Oscar-winning actress who everyone wants as their funny best friend; they knew there were breasts and other usually-covered body parts to be seen, so they took the bait.”[12]

Those words came from an article entitled, “Women, It’s Time to Reclaim Our Breasts.” So, women can talk about their sensuality, act on that basis, and even talk about “nipples that drive so much of the male gaze,” but men only need to shut their mouth and close their eyes? They can’t even take pictures and download them online? Hmm…That is really confusing and contradictory.

But this should not be a surprise at all, since internal contradiction is at the core of the sex industry. Don’t believe me? Listen to the logic of Emma Holten very carefully here:

If you pay close attention, she argues that creeps who take her pictures are out to destroy her life. But why does she stop there? Doesn’t she know that she is destroying the lives of other people (including teenagers) by titillating them? Does Ms. Holten mean to tell us that she is unaware that violent and sexual images have a tremendously powerful influence on our minds and hearts?[13] Did she know about the infamous Ted Bundy?

As Neil Postman would have put it, Holten is certainly amusing herself to death.[14] She makes the point that some of her pictures were posted against her will. A similar case can be made against women who are walking topless in the streets where children and teenagers are simply the victims.

Holten continues to make silly arguments that simply will not hold in a court of law. She says: “You don’t end misogyny by limiting women’s rights to expression and privacy.”

So, isn’t she implicitly limiting men’s rights to expression here as well? She can expose herself by going topless, but people on the streets cannot have the freedom to take pictures, including her topless picture. And how does she fight back? Well, Ms. Holten shares “nude photos to combat revenge porn.”[15]

You see, people like Holten always appeal to the moral law whenever they get into trouble. It is almost the same thing with some of the women who have accused Bill Cosby. Some of them used to work for Playboy, and those women knew very well that thisis actually a place where morality is a bygone age. Hugh Hefner declared explicitly that “morals are a relative thing.”[16] Holly Madison, a former Playboy bunny, recounted that Hugh Hefner’s mansion was filled with “harem of scantily clad blonds lolling on the bed as two big screens played porn.”[17] Now get this: P. J. Masten was a former Playboy bunny who said that Cosby drugged and raped her at the Playboy Club in Chicago![18] More recently,

“Bill Cosby has been ordered to give a sworn deposition in a lawsuit brought by a woman accusing the comedian of plying her with alcohol and sexually abusing her at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles when she was 15 years old.”

Holten, Masten and the entire sex industry and the feminist movement need to thank goodness that they never met Emmanual Kant, for he certainly would have blown their heads off. Kant argues in The Metaphysics of Morals and Ethics (published in 1797) that freedom is not really the absence of unfulfilled desires. Kant makes the convincing case that this would be the opposite of freedom (a classic example could be the Bolshevik Revolution or Mao’s great famine).

When we act outside the moral law, says Kant, we end up enslaving ourselves and sometimes hurting others in the process. Obedience to lustful desires and appetites, Kant would have said, is a recipe for enslavement. For example, when the Dreadful Few follow their Talmudic desire, which they see as freedom, then they end up saying that the Goyim are donkeys.

Kant proposes something different. Our action, he says, “must be done for the sake of the moral law.”[19] This moral law, Kant says elsewhere, is written in the human heart:

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more oftener and the more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”[20]

The inquiring mind should quickly ask: who put that writing on the wall? Well, we will not delve into that issue here. That will be discussed on a different occasion. The point here is that society or individuals cannot have a coherent framework without the moral law. St. Augustine articulated something very similar in the City of God:

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”

Michael Jones forcefully writes that

“Augustine revolutionized the concept of freedom by connecting it to morals: man was not a slave by nature or by law, as Aristotle claimed. His freedom was a function of his moral state. A man had as many masters as he had vices. This insight would prove the basis for the most sophisticated form of social control known to man, and the marquis de Sade was the first to formulate its basic principles.

“Like St. Augustine, the Marquis de Sade would agree that freedom was a function of morals. Freedom for the Marquis de Sade, however, meant willingness to reject the moral law. The project of liberating man from the moral law would have far-reaching consequences, all of which were consonant with the use of sex as a form of social and political control which Sade was proposing in ‘Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen.’

“The logic is clear enough: Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy…

“A revolutionary state must foster immorality among its citizens if it wants to foster the perpetual unrest necessary to foment revolution. Morals meant the advent of tranquility, and tranquility meant the end of revolutionary fervor. Therefore, the state must promote immorality.

“Given man’s natural and inordinate inclination to pleasure, the immorality most congenial to manipulation is sexual immorality. Hence the revolutionary state must promote sexual license if it is to remain truly revolutionary and retain its hold on power.”[21]

So, whenever people start making a worthless case for going topless and at the same time trying to maintain that things like rape and sexual assault or abuse exist, you should quickly ask, “What have you been smoking lately?” If he denies that he is on drugs, then perhaps he is implicitly agreeing with Aldous Huxley, who posited quite frankly:

“For myself, as for no doubt most of my contemporaries, the essence of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation…We objected to morality because it interferes with our sexual freedom.”[22]

Friedrich Nietzsche, of course, would have said amen to that:

“The central concern of these [Dionysian] celebrations was, almost universally, a complete sexual promiscuity overriding every form of established tribal law; all the savage urges of the mind were unleashed on those occasions until they reached that paroxysm of lust and cruelty which has always struck me as the real ‘witches’ cauldron’ par excellence.”[23]

[1] “Rally in support of women’s right to go topless takes place in Waterloo, Ont.,” Canada Press, August 1, 2015; Peter Edwards, “‘We don’t need to put our shirts on’: Topless cyclists in Waterloo plan rally,” Star, July 28, 2015; Sarah Boesveld, “Ontario sisters to protest after being stopped by police during topless bike ride,” National Post, July 29, 2015.

[2] See E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2000), 587.

[3] Ibid., 510.

[4] Why do you think that companies are willing to pay Taylor Swift and her boyfriend $10 “strip down”? Why would Femen members declare that “our tits are deadlier than your stones”? Sara C. Nelson, “Topless Jihad Day: Femen Declare War On Islam In Wake Of Amina Tyler Storm, Warning ‘Our Tits Are Deadlier Than Your Stones,’” Huffington Post, March 4, 2013.

[5] “Topless Femen protester disrupts Quebec press conference,” Toronto Sun, April 30, 2015.

[6] “FEMEN Quebec defends group’s topless tactics,” CBS News, October 3, 2013.

[7] Alan Taylor, “Femen Stages a ‘Topless Jihad,’” Atlantic, April 4, 2013.

[8] Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 22.

[9] A few months ago, he posited an argument about welfare in South Korea which implicitly was Darwinian in its principles. When I told him that Darwin would have agreed with him, he seemed to have said, “Then Darwin was smart.” He was complaining that the government takes too much money from the rich and distributes it to the poor.

“I am not disagreeing with you here, and perhaps something needs to change. But let us suppose that you are right. How do you plan on dealing with the poor and old people? You will always have them in society,” I asked suspiciously. Two other students were also eager to hear his response. “Let them rot,” he cracked exuberantly. One student quickly jumped out of his seat (we were on a bus) and said ironically, “Oh, That’s so much better! So much better!” I just could not hold my laughter for the next ten minutes, and they all ended up laughing as well, since the plan would not fly at all. In the end, I told him, “I can guarantee you that you are going to taste your own medicine later.”

Lo and behold, he did—and it was too good to be true. A few days after I wrote “American Soldiers Brutally Raped Japanese Women During World War II,” he came to me and said, “I’ve read your article.” In other words, Mr. Alexis was stepping on a dangerous territory, which is filled with explosives. His “tenacious claim” was that the Japanese never apologized to South Korea for what they did when they colonized the region. With respect to raping Korean women, he said: “Japan is politically known for evading questions and situations.”

I begged to differ. I later sent him another document which states explicitly that Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama did apologize. I later discovered that the issue is not that easy. It is not that Japan does not want to apologize or that the Japanese do not want to admit their historical sins. In fact, it would be pretty hard for Japan to deny the testimony of people like Gil Won-ok, who was just 13 years old when she “was forced to have sex with more than 20 soldiers a day, until the war ended three years later in 1945. Because she had developed tumours relating to syphilis, the sexually transmitted disease which she had contracted, a Japanese military doctor removed her uterus.” Lee Ji-yoon, “Comfort women issue is ongoing,” The Korea Herald, March 30, 2010.

Japan does not seem to be reluctant to release an apology, but my suspicion is that the country seems to worry that it will have to pay millions of dollars in compensations, and, like the “Holocaust,” this would probably be a perpetual enterprise. Kang Hyun-kyung, “Colonial Victims of Japan’s Payment Delinquencies to Be Compensated,” Korea Times, March 26, 2010. For related issues, see Lee Ji-yoon, “Comfort women issue is ongoing,” The Korea Herald, March 30, 2010; “Over 2,000 Koreans forced into labor camp in Siberia,” The Korea Herald, December 27, 2010.

My dear and honest student was still unmoved by the argument, as if I was continuing to step on an explosive which has the potential to split me into different subatomic particles. Indeed, he was more than willing to save me from that explosive: “On top of this they became belligerent [toward] other Asian countries like China, Korea, and the Philippines…”

I reminded him, “Doesn’t that overthrow the point that you were joking about a few months ago, namely, ‘let those old people die…’? If survival of the fittest is the rule, which you indirectly or unintentionally said is right, and that there is no such thing as protecting the helpless and needy, then Japan was right in raping Korean women. If the rich and the powerful should be allowed to do whatever they want, then keep in mind that Japan was one of the most powerful countries during World War II. How do you adjudicate those competing hypotheses? How do you reconcile this vital contradiction? Wrestle with that issue a bit and we’ll talk about it later.” I should have told him to pick up a copy of G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, in which a similar issue is raised:

“For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it…As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time.

“A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble.

“The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men.

“Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything.” G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 52-53.

I then moved on to make my next point:

“You know, more than sixty million Russians lost their lives during the Stalin regime [(see for example The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)). More than 45 million Chinese have lost their precious lives during the Mao regime. Thousands upon thousands of other Chinese were literally slaughtered through eugenics [(see for example Frank Dikotter, Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)). Do you know that there is not one Holocaust museum that is devoted to those precious souls? Why has the Holocaust establishment been playing fast and loose with the facts? And why is it that Korea is forcing Japan to apologize and is saying nothing about what happened to those Chinese during Mao? Is that fair and rational?”

“I would challenge you to read Fank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962,” I continued. “This book will bring tears to your eyes. Now, Japanese intellectuals aren’t blind. If the West and Korea are asking for an apology, why not China? Is Japan really the biggest sinner in town? Again, one needn’t be an intellectual to see that this is generally dumb.”

If we are brutally honest, and as I have documented in the past, the Allied brutally raped and tortured at least 2 million German civilians after World War II. Virtually no one was spared. Virtually the West never asked for reparation or compensation. As my good friend and historian Thomas Goodrich would have put it, this was actually Hellstorm. As my friend Lash Darkmoon wrote then:

“No crimes in recorded history surpass those inflicted against Germany and Europe by the United States, Great Britain and the former Soviet Union…”

Once again, if that is the case, why do Western nations are backing South Korea to force Japan to apologize while the U.S., Great Britain and the former Soviet Union get off the hook? Doesn’t Mary Louise Roberts tell us that sex and rape were rampant in France after World War II as well? Mary Louis Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Finally, will the U.S. government apologize for spying on Japanese government and companies? “Wikileaks also posted an NSA list of 35 Japanese targets for telephone intercepts including the Japanese Cabinet office, Bank of Japan officials, Finance and Trade Ministry numbers and fossil fuel departments at Mitsubishi and Mitsui.” “Wikileaks says US spied on Japanese government, companies,” Salon, July 31, 2015.

Does the West really think that Japanese intellectuals are a bunch of idiots?

[10] Chelsia Rose Marcius, Brian Niemietz, and Larry McShane, “EXCLUSIVE: Ex-NBC employee Frank Scotti claims Bill Cosby paid off women, invited young models to dressing room as he stood guard,” NY Daily News, November 23, 2014.

[11] Emily Shyre, “Women, It’s Time to Reclaim Our Breasts,” Daily Beast, September 9, 2014.

[12] Ibid.

[13] See for example Sissela Bok, Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1998); William J. Cromie, “Music Videos Promote Adolescent Aggression,” Harvard Gazette, April 9, 1998.

[14] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1986).

[15] Nina Bahadur, “Danish Activist Emma Holten Is Sharing Nude Photos To Combat Revenge Porn,” Huffington Post, January 9, 2015.

[16] Quoted in Steven Watts, Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008), 42.

[17] Sherryl Connely, “Former Playboy bunny Holly Madison reveals fake sex with other playmates was better than real thing with Hugh Hefner,” NY Daily News, June 20, 2015.

[18] Nancy Dillon, “P.J. Masten, former Playboy bunny, says Bill Cosby raped her and other bunnies, as Judy Huth plans to file LAPD report of her sexual assault claims,” NY Daily News, December 6, 2014.

[19] Emmanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 390.

[20] Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (New York: Classic Books International, 2010), 163.

[21] Jones, Libido Dominandi, 57.

[22] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: Chatoo & Windus, 1946), 273.

[23] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 25-26.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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