A recent poll claims most Brits now find male toplessness “unacceptable”
You might be unaware that male toplessness in public places was banned in most US states until the late 1930s, even at swimming pools and the beach.
To prevent the provocative sight of male nippleage inflaming the lusts of goodly Christian America when bathing, men were required by law to wear soggy woollen tank tops (pictured). Or face instant arrest.
Even slipping straps that saucily allowed a glimpse of pectoral were strictly policed. “All we demand is decency,” William E. Whittacker, secretary to the Boston Metropolitan District Commission said. “But we won’t allow slipping straps.”
Those were the days! People still had standards, back then.
‘Swim-skirts’ were often attached to one-piece swimsuits to make sure that the eye wasn’t drawn to any Satanic lumps or bumps. ‘Sophisticated’ New York was one of the last places to overturn the ban in 1937.
It seems it wasn’t until ex-Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, who won three gold medals in Paris, 1924, with his nipples properly covered, appeared savagely, brazenly bareback in Tarzan the Ape in 1932 that large numbers of American men felt liberated enough to rebel and share their nipples with the world, overtaxing the police and forcing a change in the law.
This is the sort of story that, as a Brit, makes you snort derisively at America’s puritanical past. What uptight nutters!
Forgetting of course that the Puritans were Brits. And we seem to be getting in touch with that part of our heritage again.
A widely-reported UK survey last week found three quarters of its sample consider it ’unacceptable’ for men to remove their shirts in public, when not at the beach or pool.
One in three went further and thought that their strained disdain wasn’t enough – that men going topless should actually be made illegal, with one in five agreeing ‘offenders’ should be ‘prosecuted or fined’.
When did most Brits turn into Hyacinth Bucket on a particularly disapproving day?
Also on the Hyacinthine hit list were ‘socks worn with sandals’ (56%), flip flops with hairy toes (62%), and ‘skimpy budgie smuggler swimming trunks’ (52%). (Socks with sandals are so ‘on trend’, actually.)
Oh, and in case you were thinking of donning a vest in the hot weather to avoid all those disapproving stares at your nips, 40% of their sample described them as ‘vulgar’.
But nearly half – men and women – graciously granted there could be ‘exceptions’ if someone is in ‘peak condition’. (Though I suspect that even Olympian Weissmuller’s 1930s body, with his sucked in tummy, wouldn’t pass today’s much more exacting, shredded standards.)
So, it isn’t male toplessness or nippleage per se that is the problem. It’s male toplessness that isn’t a show put on for the voyeur – but rather simply the ‘selfish’ indulgence in the freedom of shirtlessness.
To a degree these findings are an artefact of this kind of polling. A re-run of all those opinion polls during lockdown which always found big majorities in favour of restricting other people’s freedoms even more than they already were – and forever.
However you go about sampling, the kind of people who take the time and trouble to fill in online surveys (which is how most of them are done now), let alone surveys which invite you to share your opinion about locking people up if they take their shirt off, are always going to be self-selecting.
And by self-selecting I mean ‘controlling and resentful’.
The fact that women and men were more or less equally disapproving (72% of men and 76% of women called male toplessness ‘unacceptable’) is, for me, another reason to distrust the sampling. I simply don’t believe that nearly three quarters of UK men think that their freedom to peel their shirt off outdoors in the two weeks of the year when the sun is actually out is really some kind of scourge that needs to be curbed.
And it’s clear that this survey was anyway commissioned and crafted to produce this censorious result – which in turn, of course, garnered lots of editorial. If it hadn’t, we wouldn’t have heard about it. And I wouldn’t be writing about it.
This is typical August ‘silly season’ ‘fun’ fodder. But it is quite, um, revealing in its own way.
Hence The Mail article is illustrated with one photo of a large, bald, heavily (old-skool) tattooed, middle aged, love-handled, obviously working-class guy – perhaps a builder – from behind in the street, as an example of the topless, vulgar, awfulness that is ‘unacceptable’. (His wife and work mates will be reminding him of it to his dying day.)
And as examples of what is ‘acceptable’, two photos of topless young, attractive men with smooth, shredded, very worked out bodies. Spornosexuals.
The Mail, whose readership is mostly female, is the most profitable newspaper in the UK – in no small part because, it publishes, particularly online, acres of photos of barely-dressed, gym-honed, very good looking young men.
The male body must give pleasure, appropriately, and only when required. It absolutely must not exist for itself. Or be at ease with itself. That is vulgar. And ‘disrespectful’.
A follow-up story in The Mail, ‘Women reveal why men going shirtless gives them “the ick” – and even if you’re a hunk like Harry Styles it’s still “disrespectful”’ was illustrated with four photos of fit, shirtless, smooth, muscular young male slebs and one of a hairy, saggy old Simon Cowell.
In it, four middle class women opine on the subject of male toplessness, and their remarkably passionate disgust.
Class snobbery continues to be a major (unspoken) factor. One young posh lady with a heavily filtered face who is lucky enough to live next to London park, complains, in detail, about the ‘gorillas’ that spoil it for her in the summer with their clothing and footwear choices: ‘Itty bitty shorts, crocs and grey worn pants seem to be their attire of choice and to be honest I’m not comfortable with it at all.’
Worse, ‘They flop about with hairy chests and swagger around like they’re in Benidorm, not Central London…’
Benidorm on your doorstep! The horror!
She continues: ‘men owe it to the public not to be so naked in public spaces, especially if people are eating!’.
For some reason ‘especially if people are eating!’ made me snigger. Perhaps because someone clearly is eating here. Ravenously. But anyway, isn’t eating in the park peak vulgar?
Like most of the others in the piece, she also complains about a ‘double standard’ – that women can’t go topless without being ‘ogled from all directions’. Men shouldn’t take off their shirts because women can’t – it’s ‘disrespectful’.
But I thought that toplessness in public places was tasteless, icky and vulgar in itself – something that no NICE person would want to do? Only ‘gorillas’?
There is though definitely a ‘double standard’ here. The survey and the coverage are impossible to imagine reversed. A censorious, snobby poll about what women wear or don’t wear in the summer, calling for fines and prosecutions for those who don’t cover up sufficiently – with some exceptions for those deemed ‘fit’? Accompanied by ‘body shaming’ photos of female ‘offenders’ snapped in the street?
Followed by, as if that wasn’t enough, some seething middle class men sharing how ‘icky’ and ‘vulgar’ and generally disgusting the women in skimpy vests and itsy bitsy denim shorts making their park look untidy are.
The Mail would cease trading the same day.
h/t Simon M
