Women Bare Their Tops in New York to Commemorate 25 Years of Equivalent Rights

NEW YORK, May 11: The summer of 2017 commemorates the 25th year of the momentous 1992 court judgment confirming that women have the equivalent right as men to go bare-chested in public locations all over New York State. Commemorating this landmark with a summer-long sequence of open-air actions is the Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society (ToplessPulp.com), a book club created in the summer of 2011 to provide women in New York with a chance to securely exert their right to go topless in city parks, plazas, and other open places.

The group's actions in preceding years have comprised boating on Central Park Lake, book debates on the stairs of the New York Public Library, eat al fresco in Washington Square Park, figure sketching sittings on the High Line, and a 13-mile bicycle trip of the city – all completed topless. Previous summer, the group created a commended all-female, completely naked outdoor creation of The Tempest in Central Park to observe the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death. (Complete nakedness is allowed out-of-doors in New York as component of the presentation of a play or other creative show. Toplessness is allowed at any time.) The group's actions have been covered by media all over the globe, comprising the New York Times, the Sunday Times of London, Cosmopolitan, Jezebel, along with Salon.

The actions scheduled for this summer (all of which are free) comprise meet-ups in several of the city's most well-liked open-air places, and vary from exciting to just soothing: a get-together of 10-20 women reading on the grass in the park, as indifferent about exposing their breasts beneath the sun as the numerous topless men in the park are about exposing theirs. "A woman's chest is no more inherently sexual than a man's," revealed the group's co-founder, Alethea Andrews, adding, "Eighty years ago, men weren't allowed to take their shirts off in public, and today that seems ridiculous. Years from now, it will seem just as ridiculous that we ever restricted women in this way. Once people get used to the sight, it's really no big deal."