Activist Gypsy Taub climbs onto the dais after the Berkeley, Calif. City Council tabled a proposed ordinance that would allow women to go topless in public. (Courtesy Gypsy Taub)
A Berkeley, Calif., woman shed her clothes and ranted atop city council members’ tables Tuesday night after lawmakers tabled a proposed ordinance that would allow women to bare their breasts in public.
Gypsy Taub, 48, wrote about what she described as the “naked riot” on her website, My Naked Truth. She singled out two female council members over their reaction to the proposed ordinance.
"[Eight] people made public comment," Taub wrote. "Every single one of them was in favor of the legislation, in favor of letting women decide for themselves whether to wear a bra or not."
Gypsy Taub holds the gavel while standing on the city council dais in Berkeley, Calif. Tuesday night. (Courtesy Gypsy Taub)
Taub and her two children were among those who made speeches supporting the proposed ordinance.
"But [Councilwoman] Sophie Hahn didn’t give a damn about the public. She steamrolled over everything that was said in the public comment and spent a good 10 minutes spewing unrelated incoherent nonsense into our ears," Taub continued. "Once she was done [Councilwoman] Susan Wengraf joined her and said that 'we can’t waist[sic] time on this' and then the legislation was tabled."
Taub responded by getting naked and climbing onto the witness table before making her way to the dais and banging the gavel.
"I expressed my disappointment and my rage at the power-tripping bureaucrats who had no regard for the will of the people," she wrote on her website.
Berkeley’s current nudity ordinance makes it a misdemeanor or infraction for a woman to expose "any portion of the breast at or below the areola.”
In her statement at the meeting, Hahn questioned whether changing the ordinance was a top priority for the feminist movement.
"I looked at the websites of major women's organizations and this [issue] is not on any of their lists," she said. "The types of issues that are on those lists … are trafficking; domestic violence; sexual harassment; lack of access to safe abortion; lack of representation of women in politics, law, science, management; low pay for women, et cetera."
The hearing then took a bizarre turn when Hahn suggested that men could be prohibited from going topless in public in the name of equality.
"I could imagine some kind of a hybrid solution, maybe everyone could be allowed to go topless at parks and pools, but everyone would have to wear a shirt elsewhere," the councilmember said. "We could take this idea of equality and move it in both directions and meet somewhere in the middle."
When asked by SFGATE about Taub’s protest, Hahn wrote, “She seems to have enjoyed herself, and it was a lively distraction at the end of a very long meeting (we started at 3 p.m. and ended at midnight) - where we thankfully got a lot of important business done for the people of Berkeley.”
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