Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Protesters bare feelings at downtown Guelph demo

Topless protest organizer Andrea Crinklaw gets her body painted during demonstration in downtown Guelph, Ont., Saturday.

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Topless protest organizer Andrea Crinklaw gets her body painted during demonstration in downtown Guelph, Ont., Saturday.

GUELPH, Ont. -- There were a few stares in Guelph, Ont., Saturday as a small group of women went topless.

They staged an event that was aimed at encouraging women to be comfortable in going topless in places where men can go shirtless.

About 50 observers -- mostly male -- showed up waiting for the first woman to take off her top.

Only a handful of women did so in the first hour, but later on a few dozen women and men were naked from the waist up, dancing and laughing.

They weren't deterred by some male onlookers wearing dark glasses, some armed with cameras.

Organizers Andrea Crinklaw and Lindsay Webb, both University of Guelph students, say women may have the legal freedom to be topless in public, but they don't have the social freedom.

In 1996, Ontario's appeal court made it legal for women to be bare-chested in public when it overturned a charge against a University of Guelph student who was arrested for being topless in public

 

-- The Canadian Press

 

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 29, 2010 A17

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