Some people take the line that any woman who wears this outfit is irretrievably caught up in a submissive relationship with men, and so the costume should be banned, or at least discouraged. Any woman who says she really wants to wear it is suffering from false consciousness, and the same policy applies. But the evidence is that many woman want to wear it, and say they feel liberated by wearing it, and say with some plausibility that it is the women who are wearing clothes which they think are alluring to men who are in a submissive relationship, not them.

I often disapprove of the clothes people wear. On cold days young women often wear very few clothes since they wish to display their bodies. They have on their feet shoes which look dangerous, even if they are not. There is now an enthusiasm for tattoos, and I am sure they are often dangerous and certainly painful things to have applied to the skin. I remember in the past having a discussion in class about Muslim clothes and the class all highly disapproved of this sort of subjugation to a certain style, while at the same time their faces and bodies rattled with a huge number of piercings that they had enthusiastically paid to have applied to them.

There is a lot to be said for the traditional liberal policy that if something does not harm anyone else, you should allow someone to do it. If I want to walk down my road with a sheet over my body, or dressed as Superman, or as a giant rabbit, I think I ought to be free to do so.

To expand a little on Charles' answer, some theorists draw careful distinctions between "ethics of care," "feminine ethics" and "feminist ethics." An ethics of care is one in which the locus of moral goodness is in relationship; as such its emphasis is on particular, embodied individuals in concrete, historically-situated patterns of interaction. As Charles points out, it is generally taken to arise from Carol Gilligan's work in moral psychology (as opposed to ethical theory, and this is an important distinction also; moral psychology is descriptive -- saying how things are -- while ethical theory is normative -- saying how things ought to be). Gilligan observed that women are more likely to assign moral value to relationship, and so care ethics is often described as "feminine ethics," although it is certainly not the case that all or only females think this way. "Feminist ethics," as those who draw the distinction understand it, takes care ethics a step further, and focuses on lived relational experience characterized by oppression and marginalization, recommending ways to overcome this oppression and marginalization. Many feminist ethical theorists would say that standard ethical theories (utilitarianism, deontology, Aristotelian virtue ethics, etc.) fail to take seriously the systemic features that entrench oppression and marginalization.

Excellent question! You are right that utilitarianism or other ethical theories may well be able to advance causes that are central to a feminist outlook. The reason why an ethics of care has been historically associated with feminism is largely because it was seen as an important contrast to the mostly male dominated field of ethics in which justice and impartial rationality were seen as central. So, at one point John Rawls was seen as the leading architect in post-world war two ethics of a rational political theorist (celebrating a thought experiment in which one imagines oneself behind a veil of ignorance). When Carol Gilligan then came of the scene with an ethics of care, it was supposed by many that Gilligan was the feminist response to the more male oriented Rawlsian framework. But really there is no reason in principle why one could not embrace Rawls' outlook and feminism (or many or most feminist ideals), and one could embrace some versions of an ethics of care and yet (because of some accompanying philosophy of gender) not be a feminist or think that women have any kind of unique moral perspective.

Hurray for singular "they". Apparently good writers have long used it--

This is not a new problem, or a new solution. 'A person can't help their birth', wrote Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1848), and even Shakespeare produced the line 'Every one to rest themselves betake' (in Lucrece), which pedants would reject as logically ungrammatical.

Quote (and more on the subject) is here.

Although I try to use "he or she" or "she or he", and I do like "s/he" and even the allegedly ungrammatical "they" (though I read somewhere that it's not really ungrammatical), often the best solution is to rewrite the sentence to avoid the problem. The best advice on this appears on the American Philosophical Association's website:

Warren, Virginia L. (2001), "Guidelines for Non-Sexist Use of Language".

To the questioner: My sense is that either you are reading a mis-representative sample of philosophical writing or you are exaggerating the use of 'she' and 'her' because you have internalized the normative use of 'he' and 'his' and so examples that resist that norm stand out and perhaps wrankle.

When I was an undergraduate in the mid 1980s, there was pressure to resist that norm -- but I don't have a sense that this resistance was completely successful in either philosophical or most non-philosophical writing. Certainly I don't see widespread use of gender-neutral pronouns and Louise's suggestion still sounds ungrammatical to my ear. In my own writing, I simply try use a mixed balance of gendered personal pronouns.

Hmm: that ("they" with no plural antecedent) is exactly what I will scold a student for doing, though that doesn't stop them!

A suggestion: let's use the plural indefinite "they", like we all do when we're talking: "If anyone wanted the last piece of cake, they should have spoken up."

That's what I do, but I have to have fights with editors about it.

Your question raises a number of really interesting issues.

One of these is how to distinguish ethical questions from non-ethics ones. Could it be the case that your question about toplessness does not raise any moral issues at all and so isn't the sort of question that can be answered by appeal to ethics? You are right, of course, that questions of nudity strike an emotionally-charged nerve in our culture. But does this necessarily mean that these responses are best understood or assessed as ethical responses? For example, people in our culture feel strongly about table manners but these seem to be culturally relative and more a matter of etiquette than morality. Are peoples' positions about toplessness akin to those non-moral questions of etiquette? If so, maybe it is wrong to seek a specifically ethical assessment of the norms and conventions you wish to understand.

Another important ethical issue arises no matter how you address the issue I just described: The ethical significance of the norms and conventions surrounding nudity, regardless of whether those norms have an ethical basis or are non-ethical along the lines of merely conventional judgments about etiquette. What are the significance of those norms and conventions on individuals' lives? How do they relate to significant issues of gender and equality? Do they reinforce or are they reinforced by an unethical cultural system of patriarchy or misogyny? I suspect that your question engages many significant issues related to feminist philosophy and so could be used to explore those issues.

So, those are two wider sets of issues that your question raises in my mind. With respect to narrow answers, different ethical traditions will try to answer your question in different ways. For example, today I was reading a wonderful book on ethics, Jesse Prinz's The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford, 2007). Prinz argues that, on the one hand, morality is subjective, not objective, but, on the other, moral facts are real. He writes, "Moral facts are like money. They are social facts that obtain in virtue of our current dispositions and practices. They are as real as monetary values and even more important, perhaps, in guiding our lives" (p. 167). So, Prinz would answer your question by saying that the moral fact of the matter about toplessness is to be interpreted and assessed by looking at "dispositions and practices" embedded in our culture and might say that widespread dispositions opposing public toplessness by women is a moral fact about our culture. Prinz wouldn't say that moral judgments are objective in the sense of universally valid, but he would say that they nonetheless really exist in our culture -- just like money. Other ethical traditions will provide different answers, and adjudicating between those competing answers raises another huge question: the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches to understanding morality and theorizing about ethics.

As a matter of fact, there are some psychologists and psycholinguists investigating the very question you ask. Lera Boroditsky, at Stanford University, has data that suggest that speakers of languages that use broad gender marking do associate more feminine characteristics with things whose names are marked as feminine, and more masculine traits with things whose names are marked as masculine. You can read a summary of that research here: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf She argues that these and other data show that language shapes thought. However, psycholinguists at U Penn (Lila Gleitman and John Trueswell), and at Delaware (Anna Papafragou) argue against the view that language shapes thought in this way. (Here's a link to a very readable paper by Gleitman and Papafragou on this topic: http://papafragou.psych.udel.edu/papers/Language%20and%20thought.pdf

I don't think that Frye's case depends on how this particular debate comes out. Her point is that there are multiple ways in which everyday life demands that individuals make clear what their gender is. She calls this "mandatory sex announcing." The fact that our language gives us no neutral personal pronoun and no neutral form of address (it's either "sir" or "madam" or "miss") is one thing that makes us have to find out someone's gender even if the person's gender is completely irrelevant to our purposes in referring to or addressing that person. Think of writing a letter to someone when you cannot tell from the individual's name whether that individual is a man or a woman. (Think of how hard I had to work to write those last two sentences without using a pronoun!) But language is just one factor, one way in which our social practices and conventions make it necessary for us to classify people as "men" or "women."