THE BARE BATTLE

A topless bike ride latest flashpoint in rights debate

In a case that highlights the clash between the pursuit of equal rights and social expectations of decency, three Ontario sisters are filing a complaint against their local police force, alleging an officer stopped them during an evening bike ride because they were topless.

It has been legal since the mid-1990s for women to go topless in Ontario — a fact of which Tameera, Nadia and Alysha Mohamed were keenly aware when they decided to shed their shirts and sports bras after three hours of biking in the Waterloo Region in Friday’s 26C heat, with a humidex of 31. Before long, they were stopped by a police officer who, they say, told them to put their shirts back on, that it was the law. The girls refused.

The incident is building on an ongoing conversation about the sexualization of women’s bodies and the way they are “policed” and “shamed” — terms commonly used by feminist activists.

In B.C., Kelowna sunbather Susan Rowbottom complained publicly after a police officer told her to put her top back on at a local beach last week despite the fact it’s legal to go topless. Last month, an eightyear-old girl in Guelph, Ont., was told by a lifeguard to cover up because she was splashing around in a wading pool topless. May marked a number of Crop Top Day protests in Canadian high schools in oppos- ition to dress codes that require girls to cover their legs, chests and midriffs. In the past year a Free the Nipple campaign, meant to target the “double standard” faced by women expected to cover their breasts — and charged with public indecency if they go bare — while the same isn’t expected of men, has drawn much attention.

But the Mohamed sisters say they never intended to cause a stir when they rode topless for 20-25 minutes through residential streets and even past a female officer who waved them through a construction zone. Just after 9 p.m., a Waterloo Regional Police SUV pulled them over.

“He said ‘Ladies, you’re going to need to put on some shirts,’” Tameera recalled Tuesday. When they refused, citing their rights, the officer allegedly disagreed with them, saying there had been complaints.

When Alysha, a Juno-nominated musician who goes by the surname Brilla, pulled out her cellphone camera and asked him to repeat why he pulled the girls over, the officer allegedly asked if their bikes were properly equipped with bells and lights.

“We’re all feminists and we’re all already aware of our rights and are pretty opinionated in that regard and so we definitely thought ‘That was ridiculous, he had no reason to be stopping us,’” Tameera said. “Either he lied or he doesn’t know (what the law says), and both of those are problems, so we need to go to the police station and report this.”

The Waterloo police is reviewing their complaint.

“It might seem like it’s just toplessness and it might seem like it’s one law or one incident, but all of these issues are connected,” Tameera said. “If women cannot be topless in public, if we are so against the desexualization of women’s breasts, then we cannot solve problems like street harassment and sexual assault and all of these things that are connected to the idea that women’s bodies belong to men.”

Fighting sexualization of women’s bodies by baring all may not be the answer, critics say.

“Showing private areas in public and calling for “normalizing” our response to flashing — I think that’s really fighting the wrong battle,” Wendy Shalit, the U.S. author of A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue — which argues modesty may actually help fight misogyny — wrote in an email.

“Let’s face it, we’re living in a society in which the majority of young people are getting their sex-ed from Internet porn, which is often violent, and even a brand like Bugaboo feels the need to promote their new stroller with a model wearing a sexy bikini (not exactly the way most moms dress when pushing their babes). So fighting oversexualization by giving strangers more access to women’s bodies? To me that doesn’t make much sense. It’s like protesting low wages by working for free. Instead I’d love to see a higher standard of decency, for both men and women.”