Shocking Monkeys
As both readers of my blog know (Hi Mom! Hi Uncle Frank!), I try to stay away from current events, because by the time I write about it and post the article, the event has all but faded from the public view. But when breasts are involved, I try to keep timely. Of course, I refer to the shocking and civilization-collapsing baring of Janet Jackson’s right breast on national television.
I didn’t see the actual live performance, for the same reason that I do not gawk at traffic accidents—I find no pleasure in watching other people’s pain. That sums up halftime shows, beauty pageants, and other reality-based television. I just don’t care. So I missed what is being billed as the most-replayed event on television. I have the Internet, however, home of twelve-billion boobies, and Janet’s shame was on display before the Monday morning news-cycle. I laughed and laughed and laughed, when I first read the news on CNN shortly after midnight after the Super Bowl. CBS, MTV, the NFL, Justin Timberlake, and thousands of others were denying any responsibility. The breast was not meant to be exposed! There was red-lace under there that was meant to stay on. Oh, the humanity!
I thought, that night, naively, that this was a non-story, because she quite obviously had a pastie on her breast, a silvery, star-shaped pastie. (Initially, I thought that the photo was being censored, because the pastie is so big and doofy-looking!) I thought that the pastie kind of proved that the stunt was carried out as planned. Why wear a pastie at all, if not to hide the real indecent part of the breast, the scary and evil nipple? And that’s where I was so wrong. See, the floppy flesh around the nipple is just as bad. I didn’t realize this. Apparently, the bad part of the breast is the outside, the part that faces the arms of a woman. Because the inside, where Wonderbras and silicon have pushed them up to the chins of the women in television and magazines all accessible to minors, the cleavage, that’s just fine. The outside part? Only a suckling child should be able to get that view.
Sensibly, no one is offended by the young White male molesting and ripping the clothes off an older, shorter Black woman. Sensibly, no one is upset that women are used as commodities by the recording industry and Hollywood. Sensibly, no one cares that the talented Janet Jackson has to sex herself up in order to move CDs, because her talent has nothing to do with her marketability. Thank God, we’re all so fucking uptight that we can’t deal with a perfectly fine boob because it was shown to tens of million children who were watching a pro-football game, where advertisers spent hundreds of million dollars on telling American men that they have erectile disfunction and are not pleasing their American women. Hey kids! Buy beer! Don’t smoke pot! Drink beer! Trade stocks with this company! Get a stiffy! And drink more beer! And then back to the game where men are men, son.
Still, it was a stupid stunt, and I have no sympathy for the puppets that were strung along and will be hung out when the Inquisition is over. It is just a shame that real destroyers of our culture and community, MTV and the morally outraged, will both win, and the poor, maligned boob will lose.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:56 PM, 03 February 2004
