French women bid topless sunbathing 'adieu'

France's summer is fast becoming a memory, and so is one of its iconic beach sights: the topless woman.
     
As few as 2 percent of French women under 35 now say they want to bare their breasts, according to an Elle magazine poll this summer. It's a far cry from the once-ubiquitous scenes of semi-nudity on the French Riviera, epitomized by 1960s blond bombshell Brigitte Bardot.
     
"It's seen as vulgar. People are more prudish these days," explains 60-year old Muriel Trazie, keeping her breasts out of the public eye while sunning herself on Paris Plages, the French capital's summer beach.
     
Sandra Riahi, 22, in a bikini, chimed in: "I've never done it. I'd be too embarrassed."
     
In the 1960s, it took a country like France to make feminism sexy - and women did it by going topless on the beach. Men don't have to wear bikini tops, so why should we? the feminists cried. The boundary-breaking became risque trend-setting - when photos of La Bardot posing topless in the Cote d'Azur were beamed around the world.
     
The frisson of fun only increased when toplessness was denounced by the Vatican and condemned by the Spanish church.
     
When France stood up to a conservative backlash and refused to ban topless bathing in the 1970s, wearing the "monokini" - the bikini bottom without the top - became a symbol of Gallic pride.
     
But times change, and so do bathing suits.
     
Some link the demise of "le topless" to a simple change in French fashion styles - with a recent trend for full swimsuits, and ones that accentuate the bottom. But sociologists claim that the trend should be taken more seriously, with some suggesting that French women have forgotten the achievements of feminism.
 ...