Only four percent of Danish women say that they hit the beach topless always or most of the time. According to a Megafon poll conducted for Politiken and TV 2, 85 percent say that they never or rarely bathe topless.
Although fewer Danish women are going topless, the public at large has no problem with the practice, with 66 percent of Danes saying that it was fine with them if women shed their bikini tops.
“People have no problem with women showing their breasts, but women do not seem to want to do it,” Niels Ulrik Sørensen at the Centre for Youth Research at Aalborg University told Politiken. “There doesn’t seem to be a rise in prudishness as it pertains to nudity, more an emergence of a narrow-mindedness in relation to the deficiencies of one’s own body.”
Covering up, young and old
Even the generation responsible for the feminist movement covers itself at the beach these days. The study showed that about half of Danish women between 40 and 69-years-old bathed topless at one time in their life, but no longer do so.
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The tendency to cover up is strongest among younger women, where three in five women between 18 and 39-years-old have never went topless on a beach.
