Cultural Confusion And The Topfree Seven

IF you have any doubt that America is culturally confused right now, consider the case of New York's "Topfree Seven," recently vindicated by the Court of Appeals. This group of women, arrested in 1986 for violating the state's ban on exposure of the female breast by taking off their shirts in a Rochester public park, had argued that the law unconstitutionally discriminates against women, since men are allowed to go topless.

The court did not go along with their argument. Instead, it decreed another exception to the ban, which already exempted nursing mothers and topless dancers. The law, averred the judges, was meant to cover (sorry) topless waitresses, not picnickers whose exposure was "noncommercial, perhaps accidental, and certainly not lewd."

While I certainly have nothing against bare-breasted picnickers (I'm for the separation of clothes and state, which is to say I don't believe in laws against nudity, period), I think both the women's argument and the court's ruling send mixed messages.

The clear premise of the state's nudity laws is that parts of the body associated with sex ought to be hidden. The Topfree Seven case did not challenge this idea. Rather, it suggested that the law discriminates because it singles out women's breasts as sexual, and enshrines a male fantasy in law. In other words, genitals are sexual, therefore legitimately defined as private; but breasts, male or female, are not.

This may be equality, but it's hardly reality. In this culture women's breasts are a particular focus of erotic feeling and fantasy, on the part of women as well as (heterosexual) men; indeed, nursing itself, the quintessentially "innocent" instance of breast-baring, is an intensely sensual exchange between woman and infant.

Traditional nudists have always insisted that the naked body is not erotic; that, on the contrary, it's the cover-up that's arousing. I'd put it a different way: The naked body is erotic, but the cover-up converts eroticism to prurience. Taboos on nudity are part of this culture's age-old sexual protection racket, guaranteed to evoke the very feelings - not only arousal and curiosity but anxiety, hostility, shame and guilt - they are then supposed to shield us from.

Nudism offered a solution: Instead of having taboos to protect us against our feelings, we would repress them. I don't mean to lay this baggage on the Topfree Seven, but I can't help seeing certain parallels. I don't really want to make the deal they implicitly propose: that I must declare my breasts a desexualized zone to appear topless in public.

There's another problem with the respectable, asexual breast: It evokes invidious comparison with its overtly sexual counterpart, the breast that appears in porn magazines, topless bars and other frankly lust-oriented venues. These two kinds of breasts fit conveniently into those tried-and-true cultural categories, good girls and bad girls, Madonnas and whores.

Predictably, the Court of Appeals decision was based on uncritical acceptance of this dualism, pitting the topless waitress against the nonlewd sunbather. Meanwhile, genitals remain verboten, so the nonlewd can cross the line in an instant simply by stripping off (even accidentally?) the other half of her bikini.

As usual, the contradictions of our sexual culture end up being projected onto women's bodies. So long as people can't accept the erotic as part of life, they will spend enormous amounts of energy drawing and redrawing the maps of symbolic convents and red-light districts. Nor can feminists, or even judges, control the boundaries.

Already New York Democratic State Sen. Jeremy Weinstein has suggested that the city segregate topless women by setting up nude areas on public beaches, to spare the sensibilities of those "family-oriented" people who feel "uncomfortable" around bare breasts. Of course, this proposal totally undercuts the premise of the court's ruling, for if the visible breast isn't inherently "lewd," what is it that causes the family-oriented such discomfort?

And then there is the flip side. Last summer, I went swimming, topless and bottomless, with women friends at a nude beach on the Adriatic, a nonlewd free zone. Only one annoying flaw: We were tourist attractions. Men in noisy motorboats cruised slowly by, coming back for a second look, a third, a fourth, turning our idyll into a grim rebellion. We would not be moved. But at least topless bars have bouncers.

Ellen Willis, an associate professor of journalism at New York University, is the author of "Beginning to See the Light."