Men actually don't have a right to see us in public in advanced states of undress, as they would surely admit if they were not dealing with fear of Islamic terrorists.
They don't own us, or our bodies, and have no claim to them. The irony is that extremists could well use that footage to illustrate disrespect for women in the Western world, and they'd have a point.
How interesting that the rift between Western and Islamic values should reduce down, in this case, to how naked women ought to be in public. To make stripping off at the beach compulsory - as the armed police implied - is not about freedom, but the opposite.
Modesty is not a sign of subjugation but of choice, without which there is no such thing as freedom, as the French courts understood when they ruled that the current French beach resort ban on burkinis breaches basic civil rights.
I have the right to walk around in a bright pink pup tent if I choose. I am entitled to cut a hole in the middle of a chunk of carpet, stick my head through it and wear it trailing behind me like a fibre mountain.
I can wear large dark glasses to hide my eyes without offending anyone much, and if I like I can wear a headscarf to cover my hair, as some Christian sects who live among us do.
I could add gloves if I felt like it, and in the end I would be eccentric but not offensive. But such is my contrary nature that if a man, or a religion, told me to do it it would be the last thing on earth that would appeal to me.
We can't all be blessed with my bolshie-ness, and I see no harm in Islamic women covering up. I draw the line at hiding the face, which in its range of expressions is an important means of communication in itself, but for the rest I am not threatened, and in some ways I'm envious.
In my world women are starving themselves into anorexia or vomiting up what they eat in an effort to conform to an ideal standard of the female body that naturally occurs in one woman in a thousand, aged under 20. They are miserable because they have stomachs and backsides, thighs and breasts, and are willing to pay surgeons to slice them away.
Is this out of choice, or a response to images of women that push the idea that it is almost sinful not to?
In my world we are equally obsessed with the sin of fatness, which we call obesity regardless of how many kilos are involved. Body image is everything.
To have blemishes - blobby bits, varicose veins, surgical scars, wrinkles - is such a big deal that many women, after bearing children or just being the "wrong" shape, will never strip off at the beach, or swim with their kids at public baths. I admire those imperfect women who do, but would never do it myself. I'm too well indoctrinated.
I last owned swimming togs - a bikini - before God was born. My problem then was - is - fair skin in a time when a suntan is compulsory. Would I be attacked on a French beach for being fully clothed, then, and would a burkini make it worse?
It's my own business what I do. Here, in France, or anywhere for that matter, we need to take a deep breath and leave it at that.
- Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author
