Topless women march for right to go shirtless

About 50 demonstrators protested in favour of the right of both genders to appear topless in public. (CTV Montreal Aug. 25, 2013)

MONTREAL- About 50 topless women, escorted by 10 police cruisers, marched in downtown Montreal Sunday afternoon to support the right of women to bare their torsos in public in Canada.

Similar events in the international Go-Topless Day also took place in several other Canadian and American cities, as they have annually since 2008.

Prior to their march up Peel, the demonstrators assembled at Place du Canada and one woman addressed the media, specifically asking that women's breasts not be hidden in any published images of the gathering.

"Each year the media covers our breasts but doesn't cover men’s breasts. We are asking you, if you have the intention of covering this news and covering our breasts, don’t do it," she said.

The event is organized by the Raelians, a free-love religious sect that believes humans were created by aliens.

Canadian women appear to be officially permitted to walk topless in public since 1996 when Gwen Jacobs was cleared of wrongdoing after removing her top on a hot day in Guelph Ontario in 1991.

Officially, however, public decency laws remain vaguely-worded and open to legal interpretation.

The marchers carried signs and literature decrying what they describe as the “intimidation” of Rebecca Anne Clark, a Montrealer who was recently asked to put her top back on at a Montreal-area beach.

The Raelian movement was founded by Claude Vorilhon, who said that he learned that humans were created by space aliens after an encounter with aliens in 1973.

The group had a large presence in Quebec until 2007 when it appears to have moved its headquarters from Valcourt to Las Vegas following a series of negative media reports in various Montreal media outlets.