Re: the ongoing controversy over the fact that women's public exposure of their
breasts for certain reasonsis no longer a legally indecent act in Ontario.
The national community - as distinguished from the feminist community - regards
physiology (i.e.: biology), not personal intent (i.e.: volition), as being the determinant
of whether or not a body part is sexual.
The average woman's breasts are significantly more erogenous than the average man's
breasts, due to neurological differences between them involving tactile corpuscles
(a type of peripheral termination of nerves), as well as connections between certain
autonomic neural plexuses. (The erogeny of breasts is primarily a product of neurology,
not culture.) Unlike men's breasts, women's breasts have been naturally preserved
in part to perform the function of arousing sexual desire, when stimulated, in the
individuals whose bodies they are a part of (i.e: nature "intends" them
to perform this function); hence from a physiological perspective, they are sexual.
An indecency law that requires men and women to publicly conceal whatever is, for
their respective genders, physiologically a sexual body part acts on a single standard.
Furthermore, the fact that such a law treats men and women differently at the level
of concretes (i.e.: the perceptual level) does not make it sexist; likewise, neither
does the fact that the physiological identities of the genders are of consequence
to it.
Sheldon Warnock,
Beaverton