How women won right to swim topless

When a lifeguard asked police to remove Lotte Mies for bathing topless at her local indoor pool in Berlin, it would inadvertently trigger a rule change that has resulted in women having the freedom to swim topless.

The decision to change clothing rules around swimming in the German capital was made after two women, one of them Mies, filed complaints about being thrown out or barred from the city’s pools for refusing to cover up. They demanded the same rights as their male counterparts when bathing “oben-ohne” (topless) at the city’s public swimming pools.

Mies filed the discrimination complaint last December against Kaulsdorf indoor pool after she was barred from entering topless. The 33-year-old said she emailed in advance and was given permission to bathe topless. However, when she was there, staff asked her to leave. Mies said she protested that the rules only required the wearing of “commercial bathing suits”. However, the police were summoned, and the lifeguard who had originally given her the green light banned Mies from the pool.

She described feeling humiliated by the encounter, and contacted Berlin’s department for justice, diversity and anti-discrimination. Her complaint prompted a change in the way the rules were interpreted after the department found that she had correctly followed the regulations, and the decision was made to explicitly add that anyone, regardless of gender, could be topless at any public pool.

“I felt very humiliated and that my dignity as a human being was discriminated against because I am a woman, so that certain things and premises were denied to me due to unwritten moral codes that men imposed on women that are still in effect today,” Mies said.

“It is important to understand that not allowing people the same rights because of their gender is not a matter of opinion, but an act of structural sexism. Everyone should have the same opportunity and freedom of choice, especially when it comes to their own body.”

Berlin’s authorities made clear that the existing rule, which insists that bathing costumes cover the genitals, applies to all visitors, and that anyone can choose whether to wear a full swimsuit or just bottoms at the pool.

Berlin’s swimming pool operator, Berliner Bäderbetriebe, said: “Now it has been laid down that this regulation is always applied in accordance with the principle of equal treatment of all genders. There are no longer different ways of interpreting the common practice, but every guest of our swimming pools now has the possibility to decide for themselves which kind of swimwear they want to wear.”

The move follows a similar incident in Berlin in 2021 in which a French woman living in the city, Gabrielle Lebreton, was ordered to leave a water park when she refused to cover up while sunbathing. It sparked a protest featuring the slogan “no nipple is free until all nipples are free” during which women rode bikes topless and men wore bras.

Mies said there was still a lot to be done to secure equal rights.

“The main problem is that women are exposed to permanent sexualisation and this is equated with sexual availability, and they are treated accordingly. This is the real scandal. We as a society must stop treating women as objects and [start] respecting them,” she said.

Germany’s relaxed relationship

‘We as a society must stop treating women as objects’

Lotte Mies, barred from swimming topless

with nudity sometimes surprises tourists, but for more than a century the country has practised Freikörperkultur (FKK), which translates as “free body culture”. Arnd Bauerkämper, an associate professor of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, told the BBC that at the turn of the 20th century, nudism was part of a movement to be closer to nature. Bauerkämper said that for Germans living in communist East Germany, FKK functioned in part as a “safety valve” – a way to release tension in a restrictive state by providing for some “free movement”.

The veteran leftwing politician Gregor Gysi spoke out a few years ago about his disappointment in the decline of FKK, saying it was the “pornographic gaze” of westerners after reunification that destroyed the pleasure of nude bathing.