We all know bare breasts make men go a little gaga. Now we learn, bare legs can drive them to murder.

It was a warm evening in June and two girls slipped into their short skirts and low-heeled shoes. Both hairdressers working in the same salon, the girls styled each other’s hair, put on make-up, then walked into town.

When they reached the market, the men haggling over the goods saw the girls with their bare legs and started shouting abuse. Women joined in, screaming: whores, she-devils, temptresses. They became hysterical. Some men grabbed the girls and dragged them to the centre of the market. Someone produced a length of rope.

‘Lynch them, lynch them,’ the mob cried.

As the nooses were knotted, the police arrived in the nick of time and made two arrests. No, not the ringleaders, they arrested the two girls with bare legs for ‘violating public decency.’

The incident took place on 6 June, in Inezgane, in the south of Morocco, where the law does not define a dress code, and the president of the Moroccan Association of Human Rights, Abdelaziz Sellami, told Morocco World News, that the arrest of the two girls was ‘a flagrant transgression of individual freedoms.’

Human rights organisations have collected 20,000 signatures in support of the girls, who are waiting to find out whether the Minister of Justice intends to proceed with the charges. The girls are optimistic. The Minister must adore women. He has two wives.

Arab Women Against Islamists

The incident comes a few weeks after Jennifer Lopez learned that she is being sued by an ‘educational group’ for ‘tarnishing women’s honour’ at the Mawazine International Music Festival in Morocco, which was televised and seen by millions with J.Lo in a skimpy costume wiggling her famous backside.

While Morocco debates bare legs and bottoms, it must decide where it stands, in present times or with one foot in the Middle Ages. The same applies to Lebanon where, in September 2014, three defiant girls took to the street topless and burnt an IS (Islamic State) flag, their torsos painted in slogans such as: Arab Women Against Islamists.

Women’s Right to Choose

In Tunisia, a young woman named Amina published photos of herself semi-naked on the internet. Her subsequent struggle against the authorities was supported by Femen, a radical feminist group founded in Ukraine in 2008 and now based in Paris.

Femen’s international “topless jihad” had support across Europe, with bare breasted girls demonstrating outside the Ahmadiyya-Moschee in Berlin; in Stockholm; at the Brussels Mosque; in Kiev; at the Tunisian Consulate in Milan, and in Paris, both outside the Tunisian Embassy and the Great Mosque.

In Spain, Femen activists have targeted banks in protest over the world debt crisis and invaded Parliament topless to show their anger over the country’s right-wing Popular Party’s draconian changes to the abortion laws.

Bare Breasts in the Spanish Parliament

While J.Lo was making sexy moves in Morocco, Scout Willis, daughter of Hollywood stars Bruce and Demi Moore, paraded topless through the streets of New York in June to protest Instagram taking down her account for showing a rosy nipple that offended other users. ‘No woman should be made to feel ashamed of her body,’ Scout told reporters.

Which is both true and underlines the point made by the two girls with bare legs (see main picture) who took to the streets of Inezgane, a modern town near Agadir. The fact that they barely survived death at the hands of the mob sits at the heart of the clash between traditional Islam and western notions of personal freedom – and, it has to be said, a freedom when it comes to women that is always in danger of being eroded.

The confrontation also serves as a reminder that it is the young, and more often than not, the women, who lead the protest against conformist and reactionary forces, not with Kalashnikovs and roadside bombs, but bare breasts, styled hair, bare legs, and enormous courage that deserves the support of women everywhere.

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