Recently in Breasts at the beach Category

This thread in Melbourne's Age newspaper generated 23 pages of replies in less than 24 hours.

Hardly worth adding a reply after 23 pages - who is going to read it.

However, it does raise an issue I have noticed a lot lately - women and girls walking around the streets wearing nothing but a bikini. The weather has been warming up a lot in Melbourne recently so just after school time a lot of the kids head down the beach.

I just don't get walking 2km from home to beach in just a bikini. I have nothing against bikinis. I think the look lovely. But can't they throw a sun dress over them? I think it would look gross for a guy to be walking the streets wearing nothing but his speedos so this is not a sexist thing.

Last year I was enjoying a coffee at my local cafe on a warm weekday morning. This cafe happens to be just 50m from the beach. A rather attractive, well-endowed woman came in for a take away coffee with just a wrap around her waist and a brief bikini top. It would have looked great on the beach but I thought it was out of place inside the cafe.

Now if you've looked at any of the articles on this site you will now I like breasts. I like breast weather (like we are having at the moment) and I like it when all my breasted friends come out wearing their summer tops. I have nothing agains a t-shirt or top with lots of cleavage if that's what you like wearing. In my opinion it's quite nice.

But just a bikini top over a couple of DDs inside a cafe? Not my cup of tea at all.

From as far back as I can remember I have always loved the beach.

My earliest memories of the beach date back to when our dear mother (who hated the beach) would take me and my younger sister on the train to Aspendale and we would spend the day on the beach.

Of course, as I got older I began to spend more and more of my time at the beach noticing that some of the people there had breasts and I liked looking at them. I guess for most young guys, this is where we learn most about womens' bodies. Now in my fifties, I still can't go to the beach without some sense of anticipation of what delightful sights I might present themselves.

So it's not surprising that one night I typed the words "I love the beach" into my search engine. I was only a little surprised to find that there is a website with exactly that name. (I'm not going to put the link here because the site contains gratuitous nudity. Breaststories would have to have a really good reason to link to such a site. This is not a moral position, it's just that breaststories is not an avenue for people to find pornography. There are plenty of ways you can do that without me providing another one.)

This (I love the beach) site contains hundreds of pics and movies of topless or naked women at the beach without their knowledge. I do have serious qualms about that. Not enough however to stop me from browsing through the site and even paying for a short duration membership to browse more than the brief free tour.

Moral qualms aside, this is an interesting site. If it were conducted with an appropriate ethics analysis and approval from a reputable research institution (which would be very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain) it would make an excellent ethnographic study.

If you could show it to young adolescent boys, and get them to take it seriously, I believe it could change their lives. (Having said that, the hard part here would be to get them to take it seriously.) I doubt the operators of the site have given it more than a scant thought, but the question it raises is "what would the world be like if women went top free as often as men did?"

As I said in my recent post "Antecedents" a great deal of the attraction breasts have for us guys is their mystique. We seem them bouncing around under tops, we see their cleavage and occasionally we see a nipple revealed. But rarely do we get to see them unadorned in any sort of normal environment.

The overwhelming feeling I had viewing some of the movies on this site was "this is nice." Just seeing women walking around talking and playing games with bare breasts, without all of the sexual overtones we usually associate with bare breasts was nice.

Perhaps if we lived in a world like that, we could learn to accept breasts for what they are - just another, albeit nice, part of the body.

Links:

Topfree Equal Rights Association (Canada)

Go Topless

Breast Feeding Mum Plans Protest