In most jurisdictions it is illegal for women to go topless but not men, which takes care of that objection. One may think this is a stupid rule or not, but that’s the culture. I knew a woman (wife of a minister) who strongly objected to five-year-old girls running around topless, but even she didn’t object to boys the same age doing it.
As for it being sexualized, remember that in times of old a glimpse of stocking was considered as something shocking.
Y’all know that women being topless is in fact legal in more than one state, right?
Now, as I said in a recent thread, I don’t think I could walk around topless in one of these places, outside of clearly labeled camp/festival grounds. In fact, I do go camping at a clothing optional campsite in New York, and am sometimes topless there, but put on a shirt to go to town. The campsite requests it, and I don’t see the need to make their standing with the locals any harder than it already is. But even if they didn’t, I don’t feel socially appropriate with my top off in public public. But legally, I could.
Which is why my school forbade the use of tampons. Apparently there were some complaints from some of the boys that they couldn’t wear them. Rather than dive into the morass of explaining primary sex characteristics, they found it easier to ban Tampax. Despite some grumbling from the custodial staff, the policy was upheld.
Urinals were banned for a similar reason. Too much risk of the secret of their existence getting out, leading the female students down a dangerous path of unnatural curiosity. (Also the boys, if they discovered that the girls’ bathrooms didn’t have them.)
If Massachusetts’s law on indecent exposure actually covers female nipples then they’d probally be in the clear. They could argue that because of longstanding local social and cultural norms it would be a distraction to the learning enviroment or a safety issue in a way that shirtless males aren’t. Public schools succesfully use similiar arguments to prevent male students from wearing skirts or cosmetics without banning female students from doing the same. My school didn’t have a swimming pool; do schools with swimming pools often run into problems with female students demanding to swim topless?
I think the firing was ridiculous. I find this story ridiculous. This will be a story line on Glee next year.
My high school built a new indoor swimming pool during my high school years (late 70’s). We had co-ed swimming classes. The boys were provided swimsuits to wear which were rather skimpy. More than a speedo, but not much. (Think Boxer Briefs). I don’t remember any complaints. When the boys were being briefed on safety, protocol, etc. of swimming class, we were told that girls swimsuits would be one piece. naturally, I got detention when I asked “do we get to chose what piece”
Your school administration had no imagination. The boys could be told that they indeed could wear Tampax, and in fact told exactly where they could wear them.
The breast is not analogous to the vagina or the penis. Some women have the chest proportions of 14 year old males and I have seen plenty of men who have at least A cup man boobs. Both men and women have nipples. And we allow nipples to be exposed in public for the sake of breast-feeding.
If you’ve had mexican food the night before, its a good idea actually.
Yeah. I’m no expert, but I’m not sure they’re that absorbent.
People who make decisions like this should be hit with the Clue-Bat of Moral Intelligence. We were given intelligence to reason about these things, not to set our jaws, rubber-stamp stupid rules, and hide, whimpering, from imaginary lawyers.
I would say that the entire thing is is bullocks but I don’t know the entire story. This is basically ridiculous, and I think that there is no reason here to fire a coach, but it is possible that there was something else going on that hasn’t come out yet. I have no idea why this has become an issue and the whole thing sounds completely ridiculous to me. I can’t imagine a coach being fired for this, but apparently in some places it is. I also know I have ran for many coaches, and often ran shirtless. Many of our runners did. Most of our girls did run in sports bras during summer practices. Half of them still do.
I suppose it is different for me because I’ve been part of all of it since as long as I can remember. Even after I graduated I ran with the team in the summer when I was home. I run triathlons and road races now, and there is plenty of shirtless-ness. I did a tri this past weekend that involved an indoor swim, which is probably a perfectly acceptable place for me to be shirtless, but I had to run across campus about a quarter mile to the transition area before I got to my shirt and bike. Should I have covered myself up more? I don’t know, but there were 200+ other swimmers that made the same run in their pool attire. Track practice is very much like this. It has been as long as I remember, and I don’t understand why it is even such a big deal.
Brendon Small
I missed the edit window - but I supposed I could have just said that I basically agree with Whynot. Track practice is a non-sexual situation, unless you make it a sexual situation (as a coach, participant, or parent, I suppose). I just don’t think this coach should have been fired, but I wonder if there was more to the story.
Brendon Small
Now that’s interesting. Apparently this guy was almost fired once for striking a student, per the article. Yeah, he sounds level-headed and in possession of a strong moral compass.
I find the whole situation baffling. Mainly because I can’t imagine teenage girls (who presumably have grown up around boys for years and have seen a few of them at the pool or out mowing their lawns) complaining that some fit, skinny (judging from the pictures of the team that were on the news) boys were taking their shirts off during practices. There has to be more to the story. I can only go from my own experiences in high school, but the boys usually practiced way over there away from us, so it’s not like their bare chest were in our faces, and we girls rather enjoyed when the boys gym classes played shirts v. skins. To have complained aloud about it would have opened us up to ridicule ourselves, so if we had been uncomfortable we would have just averted our eyes. And it’s nice to know someone is having nice weather this early in the year…it’s been so cold and rainy here that I can’t imagine any of the track teams around here having this problem!
And it’s odd that the student wasn’t punished. We seem to give young teens immense power to destroy or damage the careers of their teachers and coaches these days.
males burn calories faster than females and generally have more upper muscle body mass. Heat stroke is a serious consideration when training and I suspect this is why the Athletic Director is now under reviewed by the school board.
You could do what Beavis and Butthead did and use them for nosebleeds? 
Dare I point out that boys can too wear them, and there is even a fetish surrounding that fact? 
Joking aside, the inherent sexism of topless guys being “decent” and topless women being “indecent” has always bugged me a bit, too. If it’s non-sexual/no big deal to see a guy’s chest in public, then why is it sexual/a big deal to see a girl’s chest? Now, it’s not always practical to take advantage of it (for guys or girls – I and some guys I know would need to worry about sunburn, and I can’t imagine trying to run without strapping the girls down… ow!). But I am uncomfortable with the unspoken idea that women’s chests are “dirty” while men’s are not.
Either way, I still think being considerate is a nice thing to do, if some people mention being uncomfortable. I do think that if you leave 'em alone, talk openly/educate well about bodies and sex, and don’t push, the awkward uncomfortable 14-year-olds will become 16-year-olds who don’t really care. That’s not a reason to be insensitive to the 14-year-olds, though. I imagine 14-year-old boys would feel a little weird about seeing topless classmates, too. And seriously, puberty is already awkward, we can certainly be nice enough to give kids space to work through that stuff without just dropping them in the deep end.
And I still think it’s ridiculous to punish the coach for something the student did.
I don’t remember, while in high school, ever thinking of any of my fellow students as “grown men/women”. Except for the one or two who were 21 and still hadn’t graduated.