The entire
Janet Jackson Superbowl stunt has been blown way out of portion. As my
wife points out so well, the streaker showed more indecency and got laughter while Janet Jackson showed us the equivalent of a Victoria’s Secret commercial and received ridicule!
The entire problem is that the United States is dominated by a bunch of prudes who make sex taboo. By making it taboo, we turn sex into the mystical thing that curious teenages just have to find out about. I bet that if it was “just sex” we’d have more people being less experimental. Or in the worse case, being safer about things.
I remember being a teenage when the first bra commercial came out. Let me tell you, as a teenager that was perusing every medical journal he could find, was amazed that National Geographic was allowed in schools, and knew where Dad’s and his friend’s dad’s collections of dirty magazines were kept, this bra commercial was gold! I spent hours trying to capture it on video tape. Yes, this was long before you could go on the Internet and just download it. We also couldn’t print pictures and taking the television into the bathroom was absolutely out of the question because it took 2 grown men to move a decent sized one. Allow me re-emphasize for the younger generation that hasn’t seen our media change so drastically over the past couple of decades that in my lifetime I can remember the debate about whether to allow bra commercials to be shown on television. In the early 80s (I think) the first commercial ran that tastefully showed a woman without a shirt. It caused an uproar! Here’s a woman in a bra on television. Well, there weren’t shows doing that and to most people this was like bringing a strip show into your living room. Now, we see Victoria Secrets and Haynes commercials all the time. They are still fun to watch but the astonishment is gone. Even Kmart had a guy dancing in his boxers.
Unfortunately, people seem to have a problem distinguishing tasteful nudity from raunchy pornography. I think our society tends to lump them into the same category. Janet Jackson did tasteful nudity (granted, it may have been inappropriate for the viewing audience but that’s not what this discussion is about) including it strategically placed in an artistic presentation with the timing of the nudity coinciding with the appropriate lyrics. What we see every day in the inboxes of our email is pornography.
What gets my goat the most is that she was primarily covered up.
This article “Jackson May Back Out of Grammy Awards” notes “The fiasco also affected NBC, which decided to remove a glimpse of an elderly patient’s breast in Thursday’s episode of “ER.”” which is a shame because obviously there are people in our society that see “it’s just a breast”.
