These days, all you're likely to see is this...

...rather than this (image from 1962 Cannes)

As younger French women decide to cover up instead of sticking with the topless tradition of Gallic beaches, a few militant groups of French feminists are asserting their right to bare arms (and boobs).

Les Tumultueuses, a group of young militant feminists, are still fighting for topless bathing rights in public swimming pools, denouncing the fact that men and women’s bodies are treated differently. “My body, if I want, when I want” is one of the slogans they have borrowed from the 1970s struggle. Two months ago, when a group of them removed their tops and dived in to Les Halles public pool in Paris, pool assistants tried in vain to get them to cover up.

Previous topless commando raids on public pools have seen police intervene to stop them. Attendants at Paris’s notoriously strict public pools have argued that if toplessness was allowed, swimmers would take more and more liberties such as arriving with no swimming hat or trunks.

The topless trend was originally spurred on by the ’60’s feminist and women’s liberation movements; now, women see it associated with “different values, identified, not with equality but desire, sexualisation of the body, voluptuousness and the body perfect.”

And in a related article by the perennially-fabulous Joan Collins: “Sorry, but only Wags, chavs, and hookers go topless these days.”