What a hoot! June is bustin' out Up Yonder

Thursday, June 19, 1997

What a hoot! June is bustin' out Up Yonder

By Sam Venable, News-Sentinel columnist

At least there is one advantage to the cool, wet weather that has plagued Knoxville all month. It has kept fat men -- and we know who we are -- from taking off their shirts when they work up a sweat.

Surely you are familiar with this type of visual pollution. You've seen it in the yard next door or at a construction zone or beside a swimming pool.

We are not talking about the guy in the Diet Coke commercial. We are talking about someone who's hairier than King Kong. With a beer gut that shades half an acre. And pants that drape in the rear, creating a 90-degree angle with a cleft in his anatomy.

Nauseating, perhaps. But perfectly legal.

Yet what if a woman gets hot around the collar and decides to do the same thing? She gets arrested, that's what, and it doesn't matter if she looks like Cindy Crawford or Mama Cass.

If you think this is an out-and-out case of gender inequity, you will agree with a Canadian appeals court ruling. The case involved the 1991 arrest of one Gwen Jacob, who was pinched -- we are speaking in the legal sense here -- on a hot July day as she strolled topless down a street in Guelph, Ontario.

Her case worked its way to the highest court in the land. Some months ago, her conviction was overturned.

The words ''some months ago'' are crucial.

You see, this took place last December. The court announced its decision, and that was the end of that. When it's 10-below zero and the snow is waist-deep, few people have any interest in peeling their top 12 layers of longhandles, let alone their T-shirt.

But now that the sun has come out of hiding, so have the breasts. According to the Associated Press, rare is the day in downtown Toronto when ample skin is not on public display.

(Back in my youth, American men went to Canada to avoid the law. Today, American women will probably be going to Canada so they can obey the law. It's a crazy world. But I digress.)

No matter how you feel, harrumph, about this issue, don't expect any change in the rules on our side of the border. At least not anytime soon.

I just got off the telephone with Mike Moyers, Knox County senior deputy law director. Right off the top of his head, he wasn't aware of any gender-related lawsuits involving toplessness, although he was certain some surely had been argued. Nonetheless, he didn't think American women would be stripping to the waist in public anytime soon.

''I don't think most courts would see it as a case of gender disparity,'' he said. ''It's my belief that the courts would still consider female breasts an erogenous zone, a private area. Thus far, at least, the male chest has not been considered in this manner.''

But you never know. American courts have been known to pull a 180 on tradition. It could always be argued that if a woman can fight in Uncle Sam's armed forces, she oughta be allowed to go as nekkid as a man.

Oops. Wait a minute. Isn't that a problem already?