The Breasts! United! Can Never Be Defeated!

As a Ventura County public defender, Liana Johnsson has handled many life-changing cases, but her biggest public crusade these days has been going topless.

For months, Johnsson has been fighting to allow topless women at California beaches and parks, and now the issue has made its way to the Capitol.

A group of lawyers, at Johnsson's request, has asked the Legislature to make topless sun-bathing legal, saying the ban is the last criminal sanction that treats women differently than men....

"At some point, men's breast became liberated and women's didn't," Johnsson said Friday.

This is only thing left that men are legally allowed to do and, for women, they have to register as a sex offender. The real issue is there should be equal protection under the law.

No, actually, the real issue is whether or not a sunbather should be entered into the class of criminals known as sex offenders. Casting this as case of gender inequity is just legal grandstanding.

While I agree that some bodies shouldn't see the light of day and should be bathed only in the dark of an enclosed shower, I disagree with anyone that says any exposed body is indecent and that anyone who exposes his or her body is a sex offender. If you want to tilt at that windmill, fight that nonsense, I'm in, Pancho to your Don Quixote. But if you want fight it as a case of discrimination, I can't help you, which is saying something.

My life is a cautionary tale, a collection of short stories of me hitching my wagon to one lemming going over the cliff after another. But making this a case of gender equity, that, my friend, is taking it a lemming too far.

Don't misinterpret that. That's not sexism drawing the line.

It is simply my belief that it's a bad idea to build a body of law (case law or statutory law) on a lie, and it's a lie that the nippled and areolae-d protuberances of men and women are the same. They're not, not biologically, not culturally*. Nothing good can come from obscuring those facts, certainly, no good jurisprudence.

So let's can the rhetoric, and focus on the real issues instead. Let's track sex offenders, but leave the innocent boobs &mdash man boobs included &mdash alone.

(*In the West, we've spent a great deal of time and art sexualizing the female breast and almost ignoring the potential of the males's. If you want to de-sexualize the female breast or fetishize the male's, call me. That's the kind of lemming I can get behind.)