I’ve had occasion recently to consider breasts.
The impetus behind this attention to breasts is not the fact that breasts are everywhere. Normally, I’m not very Pavlovian about boobs. Unless they are bare in public places, then something quite weird happens.
It was a hot day, and my wife said something about the heat and the unfair encumbrances that add to the general discomfort of women during the hot season.
“You’re not legally obligated to stay covered up,” I said.
“I know, but I’m socially obligated,” she said.
A few years ago, I took a short walk to my favourite coffee shop on a hot, humid summer afternoon. I don’t like the humidity of a blistering southern Ontario day. It makes me squirrely.
But the pressures of the weather were soon displaced by a compelling preoccupation with breasts. Rounding a corner, I saw the bare, fit backs of a couple, a man and a woman. They were holding hands. There was a startling amount of skin.
I scanned the woman’s back for evidence of a thin or transparent strap. Finding none, I followed at a safe, investigative distance.
It seemed, unbelievably, impossibly, that both the man AND the woman were shirtless! I tried to put on my objective, detached journalistic thinking cap, pondering the public statement they seemed to be making. Perhaps this was a story for the paper.
But I could not hold fast to my professional distance. Boyish titillation was overriding it.
Alas, the couple turned in unison to browse a shop window. And there were the breasts – bare, in public. How very strange and rare this sighting was. My eyes were fully gawked.
A woman with her hair done up like a strict schoolmistress averted her eyes to such an extreme degree that it seemed she might do permanent nerve damage to her eyeballs.
A man on a motorcycle slowed to a crawl and gave the couple (but I suspect mostly the attractive woman) a thumbs up. He then motored around the block and reappeared up a side street, with an even more exuberant gesture of approval.
Another man, walking at a good clip by the couple, made a quick glance at the breasts and continued for a few steps before stopping in his tracks. It seemed to take a couple of seconds for his brain to catch up with his perception. His ability to walk was temporarily disrupted.
I went back to the office and announced, with a confusing blend of boyish titillation and professional detachment, that a bare-chested couple was out on the street. “Yes, yes, the woman too.” I believe three bodies made a bee-line for the window — all men, if I recall.
Back in 1991, on a very hot and humid day, University of Guelph student Gwen Jacob made a public statement. She walked down a Guelph street topless. She was arrested and charged with committing an indecent act. She fought it and beat the rap. By 1996 it was legal for women — just like men — to go topless in Ontario.
That’s 20 years ago. In those 20 years, I’ve seen one, maybe two women topless in a public place in Ontario. And I’ve been all over this province.
In making the ruling, the Ontario Court of Appeal said there was nothing degrading or de-humanizing in what Jacob did. Those who might be offended by her act were not forced to continue looking at her.
When the ruling was made, a very creative woman I knew produced a celebratory t-shirt. It had a simple design with a simplified image of breasts on the front and the motto, “Ontario. Yours to uncover,” a play on the province’s license plate motto.
I think the creator of the t-shirt expected to make a killing, just as people across Ontario expected women everywhere to disencumber themselves during the warm season and go topless. The t-shirts didn’t sell. Women didn’t go topless. It was not the great liberation it was touted to be.
A thing may be legally permissible, but if it’s not socially acceptable, if the culture recoils at it, or if men take the opportunity to ridiculously gawk or stop dead in their tracks or make unwelcome advances, or if other women cower and mother’s cover the eyes of their children at the very sight, then topless women in public places is just not on.
So much was made of Gwen Jacob campaign. So little has come of the right she fought for.
In Ontario, breasts are to be covered.
