GENEVA (AP) – Who needs St. Tropez? A glitzy Swiss city is allowing women to swim topless now, too.
Geneva’s regional council, modifying a ban that predated bikinis by decades, has ruled that women can again pop off their tops legally in Lake Geneva and Rhone River without running the risk of a fine.
It didn’t take many petitioners to sway lawmakers’ minds. The council voted to amend a 1929 ordinance that prohibited women from swimming topless in the city’s natural waterways, but the change doesn’t apply to public swimming pools or swimming naked.
The issue made headlines locally last summer after a woman who was fined for swimming topless complained that women were allowed to sunbathe bare-breasted, but not swim that way – as if the eyes of fish merited greater shielding than those of human passers-by.
She led a petition drive that garnered a mere 233 signatures, but that was enough.