Does gender equality include men and women being allowed to publicly expose their breasts?
Well, according to Dorothy Stover — a lifelong resident of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and a self-proclaimed sex educator — the answer to that question is yes.
Stover scored a legal victory this week after Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey approved an amendment recently passed by Nantucket voters that legalized toplessness for men and women on all island beaches.
She first advocated for the change last spring, proposing an amendment that read, “In order to promote equality for all persons, any person shall be allowed to be topless on any beach within the Town of Nantucket.”
According to Stover, the idea first came to her many years ago when she saw a cartoon showing a man and woman with the exact same body, with the male telling the female to cover up.
Her desire to ditch her bikini top legally was hastened again after she realized she couldn’t do so at a Nantucket beach, despite men being able to walk around bare-chested.
“I do like to go topless on the beach,” Stover explained on a podcast recorded before voters approved the measure, explaining that there was a Nantucket beach where women could bare their upper half without hassle from authorities — even though it was illegal.
Yet she noticed a double standard one day on another part of the island after seeing several males who must have suffered from gynecomastia.
“I was at a different beach where you couldn’t be topless and I had this moment when I wanted to be topless,” she said. “I realized I couldn’t and as I looked around the beach, I’m like, ‘Wait you know there are people that there are men that have bigger breasts than I do right now but they’re able to be topless? Why can’t I be topless?'”
Stover apparently doesn’t see any difference between men’s chests and women’s breasts.
“We have the exact same makeup — men have mammary glands and nipples — and so I started reaching more into it and men can go topless but we can’t,” Stover previously said.
Not all island residents support her ideas.
“If I have to go topless to prove I am equal to a male that is something wrong with that concept,” one woman said during a debate about the proposal last spring.
A man at the time also pointed out that Nantucket has strict laws about everything in hopes of keeping a certain aesthetic.
“We talk about preservation, we talk about making sure the shingles are gray, yet we’re going to pass something that could call undo attention to the island for wrong the reasons,” he said.
Another woman was offended by that comment, saying, “To the gentleman that just spoke, I don’t like to be compared to a shingle. My breasts are not shingles.”
For now, the town is requesting “everyone to be patient and respectful as the island adapts to this first-of-its-kind bylaw in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
If you have to ask people to be “respectful,” isn’t it a sign that maybe this law isn’t the best way to achieve equality?
You don’t have to be a “sex educator” like Stover to understand that this will lead to heavy bouts of voyeurism.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.