As a campus reporter at the University of Toronto, I was sent to cover one such event. It featured one of the hugest media-to-reality ratios I'd ever seen; there were barely three or four women actually taking their tops off, but about hundred photographers — many from major newspapers — carefully documenting the news event. The result was a surreal blend of sober political analysis and Hooters. "This is an important moment in modern politics," one of the  organizers intoned into a microphone, clad in jeans and a women's center T-shirt. "This is on the vanguard of normalizing male-female power differentials. Only when we desexualize the body can we begin to attack things like the discrepancy between wages. We need to raise the consciousness of all . . . "
"Show us your tits!" a photographer blurted out.
I scribbled away (thankfully, the editors hadn't asked me to snap pictures), torn — like my native land — between voyeurism and nonchalance. Because despite the hue and cry over Gwen Jacobs, the Canada I had grown up in had always been rather laid-back about nudity. The country simply doesn't have the sort of bug-eyed moral rages that typically convulse the American Midwest. For public nudity, Toronto in particular is a highly tolerant place — not least because of the city's enormous Gay Pride Day parade, which annually brings the entire downtown core to a halt with over a million drag queens, local Bear associations and well-oiled professional dancers. The flesh display is so gorgeously over-the-top that a few years back, the city's hapless mayor, Mel Lastman, attempted to play the family-values card and claimed he was going to boycott the parade unless he was assured there'd be no nudity. However, he swiftly knuckled under, lured by the enormous voting power of the gay community (and the desire not to look like any bigger of an idiot in the public's eyes). Though he later claimed he didn't see "any naked breasts," this was pure sophistry; the Dykes on Bikes were riding right behind the mayor's float, letting their freak flags fly. In fact, one woman that year marched entirely in the nude; while the cops were willing to overlook a few topless lesbians, a bottomless one pushed the envelope — so the next day the Toronto Star eagerly published the inadvertently kinky image of a smiling, butt-naked brush-cut dyke being handcuffed behind her back by a couple of boys in blue.
The fact is, Canada — for all its cultural similarity to the U.S. — still retains an oddly European influence, which includes a body-positive edge (stereotypes about baggy flannel shirts to the contrary). Almost to a fault: the francophone retirees of Montreal and Quebec are notorious for parading their spectacularly  wrinkled and flabby bodies around Florida each winter, horrifying vacationing Midwesterners with the mind-blowing spectacle of seventy-year-old Quebecois men prancing around in tiny banana-hammock Speedos — butt-cracks on proctological display, filterless cigarettes perched on moist lips. "Quest-ce que la probleme?" they shrug. "You don't like, don't look, assholes."
So it wasn't entirely surprising when, after five years of appeals, Gwen Jacobs triumphed in court, bringing in psychologists and anthropologists to suggest she'd done nothing wrong. "Bare Breasts Will Not Lead to Moral Decay, Trial Told," the local papers reported. By 1996, a superior Ontario court agreed, and overturned her conviction, making it de facto legal for women to go topless. "The original victory for me was that I took my shirt off. The rest was red tape," Jacobs said, in a statement written — as she pointedly noted — while nursing her sixteen-month-old child.
Jacob's legal triumph had a catalytic effect. Barely days after the ruling, a thirty-year-old Ottawa woman showed up half-naked for work as manager of an apartment building, collecting rent and vacuuming while clad only in a blue skirt and high heels. "It's been terrible," she told a newspaper that hurriedly dispatched — what else? — a photographer. "So many delivery guys came over today and a carpet guy came too. They claimed they made a mistake and came to the wrong address, but they really just wanted to see my tits." In Trenton, Ontario, a woman began mowing the lawn topless, so enraging her next-door neighbor — who was worried about it corrupting her ten-year-old son — that she leapt over their hedge and assaulted her. One day while on my way to work at a magazine in Toronto, I discovered that several female "squeegee kids" — homeless teenagers who clean car windows at downtown intersections — had decided to work topless. "We're part of the New Economy," bragged one of them when I stopped her (solely for research purposes, of course) to talk.
But after rocking the Canadian political scene for a few brief, glorious summers, Gwen Jacobs vanished from public life. When I tried to hunt her down for this article, I hit a wall: she had apparently disappeared. A few years back, newspapers stopped quoting her;  when a few activist friends of mine in Toronto asked around, nobody, it seemed, had a number at which she could be reached. (Gwen, if you're reading this, my email is clive@bway.net!) But even during my brief fruitless search, it became apparent that in her absence Jacobs had achieved a mythic folk status in Canada, like a Johnny Appleseed of flashpoint '90s gender relations. A Toronto alternative radio station began running a tongue-in-cheek "Gwen Jacobs Lounge" show a year back; the country's columnists still bemusedly invoke her name whenever the summers turn hot as a convection oven and the sweat pours off everyone in a river. Her whole point was, in fact, to be not sexy, or rather, to desexualize breasts — which despite her legal triumphs, she totally failed to do, and which is in many ways perhaps a doomed experiment here in North America. But that's an argument for another, cooler day. So a belated thank you, Gwen, for lobbying into existence some lasting evidence of Canada's peculiar sexual climate: tolerant, unflashy, ever so slightly jaded, but weirdly hot nonetheless. A place where a gardener can let it swing free as she sprays the hedges, letting the sweat run off, secure in a legal topless paradise above the forty-ninth parallel. Or in the immortal words of Rush, "Whether woman or man, it makes you feel so good/so good . . . I like to please, don't like to tease/I'm easy like that."
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