Fifteen women demonstrated topless in Mount Royal Park in support of Éloÿse Paquet Poisson, arrested by police last month in Quebec for stripping her chest.
Posted at 3:02 p.m.
At first shy, the event “Free the breasts”, supposed to start at noon on Sunday, gradually gained importance when they arrived one after the other near the monument to Sir George-Étienne Cartier.
A few meters further on, gathered like every Sunday to play the tom-tom, several men had then stripped their upper bodies in total indifference, the perfect demonstration of the existence of a double standard between the breasts of the male and female sex, argued the organizer of the event, Alice Lacroix.
“Men have never had to fight to take their t-shirts off in public, so this is really a movement for gender equality,” she pleaded.
Alice Lacroix rightly points out that women have the right to be topless in the public space. “People think we do this to be sexy whereas we are just claiming our right to be comfortable for a day in the sun”, she adds, affirming that she wants to claim “their right to exist”.
An education to do
On May 29, in a park in Quebec, a young woman, Éloÿse Paquet Poisson, was arrested by the police because she had bare breasts. She shared her story on Facebook, saying the officers acknowledged she was not doing anything illegal.
One of the participants in Sunday’s demonstration in Montreal, Béatrice, said she did not blame the police who were “simply ill-informed because it is so usual that [les seins des femmes] be covered”.
“I’m really here to say: freedom, equality,” she says. If some may “have a reaction” to the sight of women’s breasts in the public space, “so much the better for them, but it must not be seen known”, explains Béatrice for whom “there is an issue of ‘education first’.
Photo Hugo-Sébastien AUBERT, the press
Another such event
Also came to demonstrate her solidarity with Éloÿse Paquet Poisson, Susie Simard told her story, similar in all respects to that of the young woman from Quebec.
On June 16, while she was lounging without a bikini top on a beach in Lac-Leamy Park, in Outaouais, she was accosted by two supervisors who had come to ask her “to get dressed because [qu’elle] was naked.
“I said no, I’m not naked, I don’t need to get dressed, half the people on the beach here don’t have bikini tops,” she says, still shocked. by the event. Despite the intervention of the park manager and then of the Royal Gendarmerie officers who threatened to “take her out of the park”, she was finally given a “warning” which she showed to the media on Sunday at the Mont Royal.
“We see the young girls walking around with their little bikinis showing off their two big, round buttocks, there’s no problem, but as soon as we start showing breasts, it’s so hypersexualized, that for example, no, we have no right to do that, ”denounced Susie Miron.
A similar event was also organized in Quebec on Sunday at Victoria Park, not far from where Éloÿse Paquet Poisson was arrested.