Tizzy over toplessness just a tempest in a B-cup

IT'S BEEN 18 months since the groundbreaking Gwen Jacob case and Ontario is not yet overrun by breasts.

Readers will recall the controversy that raged after the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that women may legally bare their chests in public.

The December, 1996, ruling was sparked by the case of Jacob, a university student who almost five years earlier had been convicted of indecency for strolling topless on a hot July day through downtown Guelph.

When the appeal court overturned that conviction, politicians, pundits and voyeurs braced themselves for the expected onslaught of naked chests.

Ontario Attorney-General Charles Harnick asked the federal government to make female breast-baring a criminal offence.

Premier Mike Harris inveighed against the threat of topless squeegee women.

By early summer, bare breasts were reported in Cambridge, Hamilton, Ottawa and Sault Ste. Marie.

Across the province, municipal politicians huddled. What if topless women appeared at public swimming pools? What if children saw them?

The media loved it.

The Toronto Sun delighted in publishing pictures of women enjoying their toplessness, albeit with the nipples artfully blacked out.

The Star, being more restrained, simply covered the story relentlessly.

Topless women were spotted mowing laws. One bare-breasted women crashed a seniors affairs at Nathan Phillips Square.

In Trenton, a woman decked her neighbour for sunning topless - in her own backyard.

The Star's own Rosie DiManno played a hole of golf topless. ``If ya got it, flaunt it,'' she explained in her regular column.

Everyone had something to say about breasts. And if they didn't, reporters asked them anyway.

``I think women who do it are crazy,'' said Mel Lastman, then mayor of North York.

George Mammoliti, then a North York councillor, demanded a bylaw that would prevent women from baring their breasts ``at restaurants when you try to enjoy a meal with your family.''

Oshawa city council voted to charge topless women with trespassing.

Anti-breast forces demonstrated at Queen's Park. Ken Campbell, a right-wing preacher, charged that the Jacob decision ``legalized strippers in the street.''

At the biker resort town of Grand Bend, bar owner Mickey Rappaport announced plans to open a topless patio.

It seemed as if Ontario were on the cusp of something momentous - if not moral decay then at least a new trend.

The first sign that there might be less to this story than met the eye came from 22-year-old Toronto student Rob Barret.

Interviewed at Wasaga Beach in late June, 1997, a disappointed Barret reported that the expected hordes of bare-breasted women had failed to materialize.

``The only ones are lying face down on the beach and that's nothing new,'' he told The Star.

But Barret's cautionary warning was ignored. Topless stories continued on through the summer.

And then they ended. As if they had never been.

Last year, the name Gwen Jacob showed up 21 times in The Star. This year her name has appeared not once.

There have been no reports of bare-breasted women mowing lawns, punching each other out or spoiling George Mammoliti's dinner.

So what happened?

I think that what happened was that nothing happened. There was never anything there.

In an effort to draw meaning from a story that was already (to use DiManno's word) ``titillating'' we forgot that not every event carries a larger significance.

The search for a deeper meaning is a very 20th-century pastime. It is also the occupational stock-in-trade of advertisers, press agents and media, all of whom make much money through trend-spotting.

In the 1997 Costa Gavras film Mad City, John Travolta plays a disgruntled security guard named Sam who ends up accidentally shooting a man.

Yet because of the imperatives of the media (and an ambitious TV reporter played by Dustin Hoffman), this largely flukey event becomes imbued with a social significance it does not deserve: lawlessness versus disorder, black versus white, the powerless against the system.

The layering of unearned significance so distorts the reality of Sam's unique predicament that eventually it ends in tragedy.

In a similar way, the Gwen Jacob case was never about anything more than Gwen Jacob and what she took to be her constitutional rights.

It was a hot day so she took off her shirt. She wanted to make a point about sexual equality, so she kept it off until she was arrested.

That was all. The layers of meaning others invested in her were meaningless.

She was not the harbinger of a trend. She was just hot and a little bit stubborn. Or as Sigmund Freud, no stranger to sexual significance himself, once noted: ``Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.''

Thomas Walkom's column appears Tuesdays.