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Welcome to America: where nipples are more regulated than guns

It started with DIY and ended with criminal charges.

A couple of years ago Tilli Buchanan and her husband were installing drywall in their Utah garage. The couple got covered in itchy insulation material, she later told reporters, so they both took their tops off. At that point her three stepchildren (a 13-year-old boy, a 10-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy) walked in. The kids were mortified; Buchanan told them not to be. “This isn’t a sexual thing,” she remembers saying. “I should be able to wear exactly what my husband wears. You shouldn’t be embarrassed about this.”

The kids’ birth mother didn’t take quite such a blasé view of the incident and complained to authorities. Criminal charges were filed against Buchanan. Under Utah law a woman is guilty of lewdness involving a child if she exposes the part of her breast “below the top of the areola” in public or “in a private place under circumstances the person should know will likely cause affront or alarm”. If convicted she faces jail time and may have to register as a sex offender for 10 years, alongside rapists and pedophiles. The judge is expected to rule on the case in the next few months.

The idea that being topless in your own home might land you in jail is outrageous and the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah has intervened in Buchanan’s case. Earlier this week, they asked a judge not just to dismiss the case but to change the state’s lewdness law which, they argue, is unconstitutional and discriminates against women.

“There’s part of [this law] that says this part of a woman is found inherently obscene and this part of a man isn’t,” an ACLU attorney told reporters outside court on Tuesday. “That really sets up an unequal and unfair dichotomy.”

It should be noted, by the way, some of the key facts of this case are in dispute. Buchanan says she was topless in the garage when the kids came in. The prosecution alleges she stripped in front of her stepchildren after stating that if it was OK for her husband to take his top off she should be able to do the same. It’s perfectly possible that Buchanan may have exercised poor judgment; it’s perfectly possible she isn’t entirely blameless in all this. But that doesn’t detract from the wider point: women’s chests are sexualized and policed while men’s chests aren’t. This hasn’t always been the case – it wasn’t legal for men to be topless in public in New York until the 1930s.

There’s been a growing global movement to “Free the Nipple” and get society, social media and the law to treat men and women’s chests equally. The movement has clocked up several victories; six states (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Kansas or Oklahoma) recently got rid of their bans on women being topless in public. The movement is bigger than breasts: it’s about treating female bodies like human bodies, not sex objects. It’s about bodily autonomy.

Buchanan’s case isn’t just an explicit example of the double standards applied to male and female bodies – it underscores just how out of whack America’s priorities are. The right to bear arms is considered sacred; the right to bare breasts is considered obscene. In Utah, which has some of the most permissive firearm laws in America, you can buy a handgun without a background check. You can openly carry a handgun without a permit. You can go grocery shopping with a pistol on your hip. But god forbid anyone see a woman’s nipples.

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