Apparently the cops are not paying attention to the law and arresting topless women in the city.
It’s been legal for a woman to go topless in public since the 1992 case of People v. Ramona Santorelli and Mary Lou Schloss. In 1986, the defendants were cuffed in a Rochester, N.Y., park for violating a law prohibiting women from showing “that portion of the breast which is below the top of the areola.” (For those who need to brush up on their breast terminology, the areola is the colored skin surrounding the nipple, e.g., “Kate Moss has small areolas.”) Santorelli and Schloss argued that the law was “discriminatory on its face since it defines ‘private or intimate parts’ of a woman’s but not a man’s body as including a specific part of the breast.” The New York Court of Appeals ruled in their favor.
