So why is the issue of equal topless rights important?

It’s not just about allowing women to go topless in public places men are allowed to go topless. This issue is very much about normalizing, not sexualizing, women’s breasts.

According to the national campaign’s website, www.gotopless.org, “In our society, men and women are supposed to have equal rights. But women are commonly arrested, fined and humiliated for daring to go topless in public, a freedom men have had for decades.”

GoTopless’s national GoTopless Day included protests and rallies in many cities throughout the nation, in states where it was legal, like Washington, and states where it was illegal.

“In cities and states that are already topless, our events encourage women to exercise their topless rights,” the website says. “Indeed, it is not because a topless law is in effect that our struggle is over. A hundred years ago, though women had just earned the right to vote, relatively few actually did because of their conditioning. It took a lot of encouragement for them to feel comfortable voting.”

More than that, though, condemning women for going topless is indicative of greater issues women face on a daily basis.

The School of Psychology of the University of Melbourne in Australia did a study titled, “Sexual objectification increases rape victim blame and decreases perceived suffering.”

According to the study, “Sexual objectification changes the way people view women by reducing them to sexual objects — denied humanity and an internal mental life, as well as deemed unworthy of moral concern.”

The study, written by Steve Loughnan, Afroditi Pina, Eduardo Vasquez and Elisa Puvia, included an experiment where 60 British undergraduate students were presented either a sexualized or non-sexualized woman. Participants were then asked to rate the woman’s mind and the extent of their moral concern for her.

After that, they were told the women had been the victim of acquaintance rape and reported victim blame.

“Compared with non-objectified women, the objectified were perceived to be more responsible for being raped,” the study says.

View this study online at goo.gl/zAhXeW.

Another study, called “Sexual objectification of women: advances to theory and research,” written by Dawn Szymanski, Lauren Moffitt and Erika Carr, was published.

In this study, they state “that 94 percent of undergraduate women reported experiencing unwanted objectifying sexual comments and behaviors at least once over a semester.”

According to this paper, “Women’s self-reported experiences of sexual objectification have been empirically linked to adverse psychological outcomes, including self-objectification, habitual body monitoring, body shame, internalization of the thin ideal, lowered introceptive awareness and disordered eating.”

View this study online at www.apa.org/education/ce/sexual-objectification.pdf.

Finally, in an Everyday Feminism Magazine article, titled “Five ways rape culture exists unnoticed and goes unchecked in our everyday life,” author Sarah Ogden Trotta says one of those unnoticed contributors of rape culture is body shaming, essentially what is done when women are told their bare breasts are “indecent” in public.

“It’s an easy trap to fall into — this idea that we have the right to an opinion about someone else’s body,” Ogden Trotta wrote. “The thing is that we don’t have the right to an opinion when it comes to someone else’s body  … Our bodies are our most powerful, political and private entities.

“The public shaming of another person’s body usually does not end at the verbal assault. People who feel that sense of entitlement may feel a sense of entitlement not only to speak about a body, but to access it. … We must stop the way we view others’ bodies as public property to discuss and use however we wish, without consideration of the human who inhabits the body.”

On the surface, many may dismiss the issue of women going topless as a small, unimportant battle that should be abandoned in favor of fighting larger ones like the wage gap or rape culture directly. But it can be argued that this small issue is very much a part of rape culture, that the unwanted sexualizing of women’s bodies contributes to sexual assault and victim blaming.

“We need to conduct our lives in ways that exclude and denounce all aspects of rape culture,” Ogden Trotta wrote, “even the seemingly small-scale infractions — because those are what rape culture builds upon to function.”

View Ogden Trotta’s article online at www.everydayfeminism.com/2013/01/five-ways-rape-culture-exists-unnoticed.

To read coverage of the Aug. 28 GoTopless protest, click here.