The Right to Go Bare in Manhattan

Go Topless Day happens every year in late August, women gathering in cities across the country to assert their right to go shirtless in public—a right that is, legally speaking, already guaranteed in New York State, not that it stops anyone from making a scene about it. The 2012 edition brought out the committed and the curious in roughly equal measure, along with the photographers who showed up with very particular intentions. The underlying argument is simple and correct: if a man can take his shirt off on a hot day without incident, a woman should be able to do the same. Whether gathering once a year to demonstrate the obvious changes anything is less clear. It usually doesn’t. But some things are worth doing anyway.