Berlin allows women to swim in topless pools

Berlin-based gender equality activists celebrate a rule change that affects indoor and outdoor pools so women can now go topless.

According to The Guardian, Lotta Mees, who tried to swim topless in her local indoor pool in Berlin, was the “pioneer” of change. But the lifeguard called the police to expel the woman who was bathing in an “inappropriate”, in his opinion, form.

This incident eventually led to a change in the rules allowing all women, including visiting tourists, to freely go topless while swimming in the German capital.

The decision to change the rules for swimming in the German capital comes after two women, including Mies, filed complaints about being thrown out of a pool or banned from city pools for refusing to cover up, and demanded the same rights that enjoyed by men when swimming topless in the city’s public pools.

Berliner Lotta Mies, 33, filed a discrimination complaint against an indoor swimming pool in Kaulsdorf last December after she was banned from topless swimming. The woman said that she sent an email in advance and received permission to swim topless. However, when Mies showed up at the topless pool, the staff asked her to leave.

Lotta Mees says she protested that the rules only require “commercial bathing suits” and that she was allowed, but the police were called and the lifeguard, who had originally given her the green light, forbade Mees from entering the pool.

Mies said she felt humiliated when she left and contacted the Berlin Office for Justice, Diversity and Anti-Discrimination. Her complaint led to a change in the rules after the department found that Mies had misunderstood the swimming rules, and the decision was made to explicitly add that anyone, regardless of gender, can be topless in public pools.

“I felt very humiliated and felt that my dignity as a human being was discriminated against because I am a woman, so that I was denied certain things and premises because of the unwritten moral codes that men imposed on women and which are still in force today. ‘, Lotta Mis told The Guardian.

“It is important to understand that denying 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 opportunities and, above all, freedom of choice, especially when it comes to their own body,” Mies continues.

Authorities in the German capital have made it clear that the current rule, which insists that bathing suits cover the genitals, applies to all visitors, and that anyone can choose whether to wear a full bathing suit or only swim trunks in the pools.

“It is now established that this ordinance is always applied in accordance with the principle of equal treatment of all sexes. There are no longer different ways of interpreting common practice, but every guest of our pools now has the opportunity to decide for themselves what kind of swimwear they want to wear,” said the Berlin swimming pool operator Berliner Bäderbetriebe.

The move follows a similar incident in Berlin in 2021, in which city-resident Frenchwoman Gabrielle Lebreton was ordered to leave a water park when she refused to cover her breasts while sunbathing. This sparked a protest with the slogan “No nipple free until all nipples are free” in which women rode topless bikes and men wore bras to protest the double standards.

Lotta Mees welcomed the rule change but said there was still more to be done to ensure equal rights for all genders.

“The main problem with this whole topic is that women are constantly being sexualized, and this equates to sexual availability, and they are treated accordingly. This is a real scandal. We, as a society, must resist this socialization and stop treating women as objects and start respecting them,” she added.

Germany’s casual attitude towards nudity sometimes shocks tourists, The Guardian notes, but for locals, this new policy is not surprising or, in fact, new. For more than a century, Freikörperkultur (FKK) has been practiced in Germany, which translates as “free body culture”.

Arnd Bauerkemper, 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 get closer to nature. The expert noted that for Germans living in East Germany, the “free body culture” functioned in part as a “safety valve” – a way to relieve tension in the GDR by allowing some “free movement”.

Berliner Bäderbetriebe said it welcomes tourists to the city and its public swimming pools and asked guests to show “mutual respect and tolerance” when visiting.

Veteran German leftist Gregor Gysi spoke a few years ago of his frustration with the decline of “free body culture,” saying that it was the “pornographic gaze” of Westerners after reunification that ruined the pleasure of nude bathing. He urged German local authorities to do more to protect FKK beaches and spas.

Berlin is not the only German city where topless swimming is allowed. In May 2022, Göttingen in Lower Saxony became the first German city to allow women to swim topless in its indoor and outdoor pools.