Wednesday, 22nd April 2009
An indecent booby trap!
I love travelling but every time I leave the country it seems that something ridiculously funny happens here in Malta. On my return from Cyprus last week, I read the news headlines on this very website. I was hoping that in my absence nothing interesting and exciting had happened, and that I would only get to read about the usual boring political stories with Gonzi, Joseph and Harry pulling each other’s hair out; but as luck would have it, in my absence, a topless dancing soldier had been seriously reprimanded. The headline read – Topless dancing soldier gets warning.
Even though the word ‘topless’ is hardly ever used in reference to men, and even though I’ve been through rigorous gender representation training, I still fell into the stereotype-trap of thinking that I was about to read a story about a male soldier who took his his top off! The word ‘soldier’ is so testosterone-heavy that it did not occur to me that the story was in fact about a woman! It was precisely this realisation that made me go blue in the face at the blaring signs of gender discrimination.
Can someone please explain to me how it is possible to charge a female holiday-maker with ‘indecent attire’ when she is drunk and is dancing topless in an adult bar at an ungodly hour of the morning? How can this be ok when men, with unsightly wobbly bits, hairy backside cleavages, and hot dog grown boobs, can walk around uninterrupted passing wind from all orifices and at all hours of the day and night, and wherever they please?
I understand that some thousands of years ago, when mankind (there I go again), I mean humankind, stretched up from walking on all fours and started to walk upright, somehow, somewhere, women’s breasts became yet another sexualized area, but does exposing them in a strictly adult environment really constitute ‘indecent attire’? Is exposing an area of your body that could prove attractive to the opposite sex indecent? If it is, we might as well cover up our faces too, because most find faces more attractive than any other body part.
Can someone tell me what would happen if transvestites with breast implants had to go out topless? Would they be arrested for indecent attire? If so, they would have to be considered to be women and allowed to get married to a man the next day. Or can a person’s sexual identity change on a daily basis to fit our Neanderthal law?
Seriously, why is it so impossible not to sexualize a woman’s body? Even in Sweden, one of the most liberal countries in the world, a woman is free to sunbathe topless on beaches but is required to wear a top at public swimming pools. The reason, according to Inger Groteblad – a manager at a swimming facility in Uppsala – is a matter of security. It’s not because anyone is ‘booby-trapped’, but it is a precautionary measure in order to make sure that the women do not get harassed. With the same quantum leaps of logic we should therefore ban children from playing fields because that is where paedophiles tend to hang out and harass them.
Two summers ago, a friend of mine was charged and summoned to court also accused with ‘indecent attire.’ For years she had worn itsy bitsy teeny weenies aqua striped skimpy bikinis, the size of which barely qualified them for an eye patch, but the moment she was sunbathing topless at a well known ‘nudist’ beach in Malta, all hell broke loose. Even though she happened to be facing down when the police arrived, she was asked to get up and dress up, her particulars were taken and three months later she found herself in court being accused of the very subjective, yet apparently very grave, ‘indecency’ crime against humanity.
Unfortunately, despite her lawyer’s efforts, she initially lost the case and was reprimanded just like our English soldier. She was also given a week’s probation during which she could not commit another crime...or else. However, she appealed the sentence and this time the judge decided that the law is unclear and that the terms ‘indecent attire’ leave too much leeway for subjective judgement.
Clearly, two years down the road the law is still unchanged, and our already overstretched courts and police corps still get to waste time and public taxes on silly cases such as this one. As interesting as it might be for a police officer to stop such outrageous crimes, we also have real crimes that go unsolved every year. Unfortunately we also have important court cases that take forever and a day to be finalized, and we have people’s entire lives being put on hold because real criminals are out on bail for years before they are found guilty as charged; so as ‘indecent’ as some might think it is, given that we’re in the 21st century not the 12th, the only worry we should have when we take our tops off is skin cancer and not that of getting arrested by a bored police officer.
One thing is for sure - most would find the perfectly legal exposure of forest-like bikini lines, gorilla backs and hairy butt cracks by far more indecent than topless women, and yet, even though there are far worse assaults on the senses than a genuine pair of women breasts, the silly topless enforcement brigade lives on.
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