A brief video from the National GoTopless rally at Pack Square in downtown Asheville. Due to the very nature of the event, the video should be considered not safe for work.

Xpress caught the early part of the event.

UPDATE: AskAshevillle put together this comprehensive video of the event.

Here’s more information on the event, from the GoTopless website.

Free your breasts, free your mind! Some healing words

Come join us in Asheville, NC where we will celebrate National GoTopless Day in Pack Square at 1PM.

North Carolina is a top free state so our Gotopless event will encourage the participating women to exercise their right to be topless in public.

It should be such an easy thing to do but with centuries of repression upon us, it is sometimes difficult for women not to feel ashamed of exposing their bosom in public.

With these GoTopless events, we aim to push back further the frontier of indecency which once started at our ankle and wrists when long gowns with long sleeves were in fashion. Back in the 1900’s, women would have felt completely ashamed of wearing a 2 piece bikini on the beach.

Women have certainly come a long way since then. A hundred years later, their challenge is to overcome their shame over exposing their breasts in spite of the harsh criticism of those who would like to maintain the discriminatory status quo: man can show their chest but women can’t.

The pretense is that women’s chest is sexually appealing. That is true. However, what part of a woman’s body is not? The Taliban have gone to the extreme to barrage every inch of women’s sensuality.

In American, we seem to have come to terms with a more sectioned type of “Burqa” which even our most conservative americans are finding “decent”. However, Taliban men would find outrageous the attire that conservative American women find decent and proper.

One can see that it is simply a matter of programming and upbringing. In Western Europe, after 40 years of women going topless on the beach, no one even looks at topless women sunbathing anymore.

Men are no longer any sexual obsession over their breasts because it has become a normal sight. It is difficult for many Americans to imagine this in our society but that is how the human brain works. Repression brings obsession. When the repression is gone, the obsession goes away too.

That is a good thing because repression can also beget violence and the most repressed society are indeed the most violent. So when Maitreya Rael founded GoTopless.org he had women’s rights in mind but also the healing of a very troubled humanity.

Free your breasts, free your mind women and men of Asheville… for Humankind.

Nadine Gary, president GoTopless.org