A young woman has been left outraged after being ordered to cover up while sunbathing topless to avoid tan lines. She explained how she moved to America three years ago from a country where it's common for women to sunbathe wearing only their bikini bottoms - but she never expected it to be such an issue in 'the land of the free'.
Taking to Reddit, she said: "Me and my friends wanted to hang out one more time before finals and the holidays. We live in a very warm part of the country where it’s essentially summer so we went to my friends big house to spend the weekend and use her pool.
"Two of the guys in my friend group invited their girlfriends. In total, there were four women and three men." After taking a seat poolside, she casually removed her bikini top and started sunbathing with her chest to the ground.
"I didn’t think it was obscene or inappropriate and honestly I’m not particularly well endowed so I didn’t think I was too attention grabbing," she added.
"I was on my stomach first and then switched to my back.
"I don’t think I was being stared at but I had my eyes closed most of the time. Whenever I did open them, no one was focused on me."
But about 10 minutes later, she was approached by the girlfriends who called her a "whore" for sunbathing with her breasts on show.
She said: "If they had just said, 'Hey I don’t feel comfortable with you being topless around my partner could you please put on your top', I would have done it.
"But what she did was drop my top on my stomach and say that I need to 'Put my breasts away in front of her man'.
"Now because I thought she was just being rude for no reason as I didn’t know I was being unnormal, I said no.
"Then she said, 'I don’t know what they do in France (I'm not even French) but here, most women don’t parade themselves around like this unless they are a whore'."
Outraged, the young woman started arguing back until one of her male friends pulled her aside to explain how it "wasn't typical in the US and the guys had been looking" at her a lot.
"I put back on my top. Now the boyfriends are trying to get me to apologise, which I don't think I should and they think I was being a jerk," she added.
Wanting to know whether she was in the wrong, she turned to Reddit users for their thoughts.
In response, one user said: "Three years is enough time to figure out the cultural norms of a new place.
"If you were unsure, even when everyone else kept their tops on, you could have asked. You knew it would cause a problem and then, once it did, you escalated it by arguing
"But they could have asked nicely and not called you names, it didn’t need to go to that level. They were rude. The dudes also suck for openly ogling you and demanding an apology."
Another user added: "Any nudity that's beyond the cultural norm of a situation should be consented to from the people you're with, but they were rude about how they handled it and the guys shouldn't have ogled you.
"You're wrong for saying 'I'm not particularly well-endowed so I wasn't too attention-grabbing' - can people stop acting like women with small ones don't get checked out too? We definitely do."
A third user said: "I think you are weaponizing your 'I'm from another culture' bit. You've been here three years, in a hot/warm part of the country. I doubt you haven't run into this situation before/seen this.
"They absolutely suck for what they said to you, and they should apologise. So should the boyfriends, for ogling you. But so should you, for making people uncomfortable."
Do you have a story to share? Email paige.freshwater@reachplc.com.
