On a long-ago vacation in the Algarve, my two early-teen sons, who had left the hotel pool to go and swim in the sea, came rushing back towards me in a state of high panic. “Dad! Dad! Ugh! There are these old women lying on the beach without bikini tops! Ewwww!”
In the interests of parental concern, of course, I had to see for myself what was causing such panic, so I wandered over to the clifftop and peered down. Yup, the boys were correct: there was a crowd of elderly French women, sagging, pendulous breasts burned almost chocolate brown, sprawled on towels all over the white beach sands.
That may be a thing of the past, according to some study or other, because it appears that French women are no longer interested in topless sunbathing.
Once widespread in France, topless sunbathing is going out of fashion, a survey has shown, with fears about harassment, body image and health seen as prompting a trend to cover up more at the beach.
Fewer than one in five Frenchwomen under 50 said they sported a ‘monokini’, compared to 28 percent a decade ago and 43 percent in 1984, according to the survey by French pollster Ifop published Tuesday.
Young women aged 18 to 25 said harassment, criticism of their bodies and being ogled by men were their biggest barriers to going topless.
Note the highlighted “under 50” qualification above, because it probably means that the sights which so frightened my sons back in the early 2000s are not going to disappear soon.
So as a public service to my Loyal Readers, here are a few examples of what’s going to be vanishing in France:
No need to thank me; it’s all part of the service.
Regarding the over fifty crowd, my maternal grandfather remarked in his war diary, on his way to the front, about the old topless French women working the fields through which his troop train passed. After observing these specimens, he wondered why the doughboys were there. The huns could have the place as far as he was concerned.
This is the Daily Mail, far from a reputable source. Are you sure that French lassies aren’t covering up because they weren’t being ogled?
Hey! Don’t doubt the Daily Hate, they don’t have any agenda other than the unvarnished truth!
The problem in Europe is increasing prudishness, driven in large part by harassment and worse from crowds of young muhammedan men.
They’re storming swimming pools, fondling and sexually assaulting any woman or child they can find and beating up the men.
And the government response tends to be to shut down swimming pools while glossing over who is responsible because taking action against those muhammedan gangs would be “islamophobic”.
I was on a beach in French Polynesia and the sight of naked sun baked elderly men was worse than the old ladies, who can be ignored.
Seeing a pair of ancient men playing chess using plastic chairs and a table in knee deep lagoon water, both with pendulous wrinkled scrotums (Scrota? Scroti?) dangling off the edge of the chairs into the water about a foot below…ugh. Made me realize what I would look now.
Maybe time to learn to accept others as they are rather than see everything as either a sex object?
We are monkeys with an education, animals, so every-fucking-thing is about sex and only a lunatic denies it, along with his humanity.
Old age is ugly. It’s shite, but it’s true. I’m ugly. I used to be pretty. I used to resent becoming ugly, but now I understand.
be comfortable in your own skin, and that starts by not denigrating others for how they look in theirs…
We’ve here in the Netherlands almost yearly demands from the far left to ban bikinis for women over 40 because “they are ugly in them”, and for preteen girls because “it sexualises them”.
There’s even petitions now to turn all beaches into “halal beaches” to apease the muhammedans, banning all bikinis and swimsuits for women and requiring them to be completely covered at all times.
All to promote “diversity” and prevent “islamophobia” and “religious discrimination” of course.
And those petitions do not come from muhammedans, they come from the political left and Christians…
Scrota
That’s what I like about your reporting Kim. You leave no aspect of a story uncovered.
I think he’s leaving quite a bit uncovered in this story 😉
I wondder how much of the harassment is by MENA immigrants. I have read that in much of Europe, women are afraid to go out in public with bare arms, bare legs, or visible cleavage, i.e. anything a Middle Eastern Moslem would consider “immodest”.
OMG, the TRIGGERING!