“Janet Jackson and the Breast that Roared”
Op-ed commentary by Richard Speer
(plain-text version)
© 2004
Is there anyone alive who honestly believes that Janet Jackson’s breast is the harbinger of Western civilization’s decline? Yes, Virginia, there is such a reactionary, and his name is Michael Powell. When the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission saw Miss Jackson's nipple this weekend on his living room boob tube, he says he “knew immediately that it would cause great outrage among the American people.”
But it is the puritanical Powell, not Jackson, who should be the object of our outrage. The Chairman and his two children were watching the now-infamous Super Bowl half-time show on CBS when Jackson’s nipple-pierced breast was bared by fellow pop singer Justin Timberlake. Later, Jackson coyly apologized for what she called the “costume reveal,” while Timberlake ate humble pie over what, even more puzzlingly, he termed a “wardrobe malfunction.” While much of America yawned, Powell resolved with full righteous wrath to launch an F.C.C. investigation, for which you and I will pay in dollars and liberties lost.
What kind of cultural vacuum does Powell—and do we—live in? Our unblushing German and Italian cousins see far more skin per pixel per night on prime-time commercials than we will ever take in, even if we replay Miss Jackson’s split-second exposure till our TiVos explode. In Scandinavian high schools, students take co-ed saunas after gym class. In Danish convenience stores, erotic magazines sit, sans cellophane, in low-lying display racks. And on the sunny strands of the Côte d’Azur, children from eight to eighty frolic quite nakedly and quite innocently, even as tourists from Wichita glare and stare at them. How could it be, with all that nudist debauchery, that European kids grow up so suave and savvy, while we across the Atlantic turn into neurotics, petrified of intimacy and contemptuous of our own bodies? Could it be, perchance, that breasts don’t kill people -- but people who hide and hate breasts do?
Sadly, our would-be brazen pop stars wimp out when pseudo-pious politicos so much as raise an eyebrow. Would that our idols had the courage of their convictions! If Janet and Justin decided it would be fun to tweak societal mores, why not just admit it, rather than offering all the hand-wringing mea culpas? Surely they, and the rest of us, don’t owe it to Michael Powell to feign shame over exposing the very same body part, with its almost wholesome blend of utility and form, which our mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters all have beneath their blouses, if they are lucky.
I detect a whiff of misogyny under all the anti-mammary bluster. The good old establishment boys like Powell and the décolletage-phobic John Ashcroft want to keep women covered up, lest they unleash the castrating power that Camille Paglia calls “cthonian”: the briny swamp of female sexuality, waxing and waning with the moon, bidding us ever back to the womb-tomb whence we came.
Except that, in reality, the breast is nowhere near that sinister. Look at enough of them, and they might even bore you. Rest assured, if your little Kaitlin or Ethan sees a pop diva’s breast on CBS, the sun will still rise tomorrow. At the most, you may have to explain what a nipple shield is, but then, apparently that finer point of body-piercing paraphernalia needs to be explained to The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley, who called the shield, quaintly, a “nipple brooch” in her February 3 piece on the uproar.
Just three days before the ballyhooed Super Bowl, a suicide bomber blew apart a bus in Jerusalem, scattering the heads and limbs of ten passengers onto the street. These are the sorts of body parts that should outrage us, not the ones under Janet Jackson’s bra.
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