I sympathise slightly with the woman who isn't allowed to take her top off to keep cool, if she doesn't mind exposing a part of her body which many women would be embarrassed to expose. But then, one might equally say that much more stringent rules are applied to men when it comes to formal dress: woman can wear almost anything that looks reasonably smart and doesn't have gaudish designs on it, while men are excluded from the gathering if they don't have a dark suit, a tie, and polishable shoes. Besides, if she's too hot, she can always wear a bikini top.

I think the criterion on which the law rests is that it is illegal to display sexual organs in public. Breasts are sexual organs – if secondary ones, not primary – and thus fall under the jurisdiction of decency laws. Of course, laws about public exposure don't affect what pictures people may trade between each other in private, and so the nude-picture trade happens and is allowed to happen. But women are just as free to trade pictures of naked men if they want to – if they choose not to do so quite so much as men do, that's up to them, and shouldn't affect men's choices.

In addition, I think anyone who tries to tell a woman not to breast-feed in public is stupid and should bugger off. They don't have to look; and the baby's mouth covers the nipple anyway, so the law isn't broken. Most women prefer to do it somewhere quiet anyway – but if one doesn't, she shouldn't have to make her baby starve. Besides, the law is presumably about needless or unwarranted exposure of the breasts: this means that their primary function should not be restricted.

Yours, Tim .


You must chop down the tallest tree in the forest with... a herring!


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