Right to go shirtless/topless in public?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I don't think there's an inherent human or civil right to be topless in public, but there is a civil right to have whatever rule about it there is applied uniformly regardless of sex. As BRTD points out, most states do recognize this, only there's just not that much appetite among women for going topless in most situations, for social and cultural reasons. But I've been to top-optional and even fully clothing-optional beaches and the like in both Europe and Vermont (the Spain of the US when it comes to this sort of thing), and in my experience it's really not as big a deal as most people still seem to think.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This is something people make a far bigger deal about than it is. It's actually not illegal in most places in the US for women to be topless in public.



(Also Minnesota should be light blue as well.)

It's actually been legal in all of Canada for almost 30 years because of a Canadian Supreme Court decision...and guess how often women are seen topless in public in Canada. It also seems the majority of Canadians aren't even aware of this.

So it's almost entirely a social expectations thing than a legal thing.

I find it interesting how little correlation this map has with evangelical populations or whether a state is red or blue.

Probably because in mainstream politics it’s a non-issue; many of these laws were likely enacted 50 or 100+ years ago and no one has bothered to change them.

Some of it also probably has to do with court decisions that nobody bothered to punt up to SCOTUS, since women do sue about this occasionally even though it's not a high-salience issue. I think Utah is in yellow rather than dark red because of a Tenth Circuit decision, for instance.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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Should distinctions be made between men and women?

No

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Should distinctions be made between men and women?
No

What do you guys think of this statement that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., made in a dissenting opinion he wrote to the 1923 case Adkins v. Children's Hospital?

It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.

There's taking differences into account and then there's making the same behavior unexceptionable for one sex and a criminal offense for the other.

Regardless, as has been mentioned up-thread, this isn't a criminal issue in most states anyway; this isn't something the vast majority of women want to do, although that majority would be a little bit less vast if it weren't for various other kinds of social and cultural pressures.