Every now and then something happens that shows just how puritanical this country really is. I watched the Super Bowl, rooting for the Patriots, worried that Tom Brady was getting tired by the first half, concerned that the Panthers were starting to hit back...but I was content to have my team siting a few precious points ahead at halftime, and I was ready to watch the halftime show, not my favorite part of this t.v. extravaganza.
Rap music dominated, something that only a few people bought twenty+ years ago, and I thought to myself, "this country has really come a long, long way since Kurtis Blow came out with his big rap hit 'The Breaks', back in 1980." Now rap is not a small inner city music form, but like rhythm and blues would explode into rock and roll, and then rock would become over-commercialized by the seventies, now rap was sitting in the same, over-hyped, over-commercialized state.
So I'm drinking my beer and on comes Janet Jackson, from Motown's most dysfunctional family. I thought she looked pretty hot, and the duo bit with Justin Timberlake reminded me of a pale copy of Mick Jagger and Tina Turner onstage in 1985.
But then Justin reached for Janet's right breast, and..."oh my God!" a NIPPLE was exposed. Not a male nipple, which one sees every summer, but a FEMALE one!!! Heavens!!! I must confess that I saw the performance live, on a fairly large t.v. screen, but I don't remember seeing the nipple. Maybe I wasn't staring closely enough?
Anyway, the next day, the entire nation was up in arms, shaming the event, and making a BIG DEAL out of seeing a nipple on national, prime time t.v.
America, what's the big deal? In Europe, South America, and many parts of Asia and the Pac rim, female breasts bounce freely on the public beaches. Why is this such a big thing--are we so culturally immature that we can feature ads for penile erection drugs, show horses farting in ads for beer, show women teasing and strutting, and show how we are better than the Islamic nations that force women to cover their faces but we can't allow them to go topless? This whole thing sucks. It's time for us to grow up, loosen up, and stop being such prissy little wusses. In 1964, Jan & Dean sang a song called "One-piece Topless Bathing Suit (And She's Only 94 Years Old)"--and it made the charts. The gag was, she's an old bag, so who cares if she's topless? Well, I say, if men can go topless, why can't women, if they want to, in public? Nobody likes a prissy old reform school director, and it's time we stopped being like one as a nation.
Showing the ankle in the 1890s wasn't the downfall of womanhood as Collier's once said, and jazz didn't ruin morality in the twenties, rock 'n roll didn't corrupt the youth in the fifties, and toplessness won't corrupt the youth of this millenium.
Isn't it time we changed this stupid law?