EXECUTIVES at MTV decided that 100 million Americans would want to watch onetime teen heartthrob Justin Timberlake violently expose the mutilated breast of the 40-ish rock singer Janet Jackson during the halftime show of last week’s CBS’s Super Bowl broadcast. We have no interest in disputing that judgment. Nor do we wish to gainsay the rap “artist” Kid Rock’s testimonial to “hookers all trickin’ out in Hollywood” during the same show. Nor would we hinder responsible adults from watching the crooner Nelly massage his crotch for several minutes. Nor would we be unhappy if the testimonials of Mike Ditka and others made penile impairment a thing of the past. Urging “immediate medical care” for those whose drug-induced erections perdure past four hours might even save lives. If you get a kick out of ads featuring pubic waxing and horses blowing farts in women’s faces, laugh away.
But we believe CBS’s decision to use a national sporting tradition to peddle all of the above to a fifth of American children under the age of 11 (by Nielsen estimates) ought to meet pitiless political resistance from the American public. Sports is among the joys of most American childhoods, so CBS knew that 6-year-old boys and 9-year-old girls would make up a large part of its most attentive viewers. But the network–or more to the point, its parent company Viacom, which owns MTV, too–lacked either the common courtesy or the business ethics to tell parents that their children were going to be roped into an evening of scatology and stripping.
Any civilized society recognizes that sex can be both a blessing and a weapon. In the interest of promoting the former aspect over the latter, parents–who lack the incentives that, say, large corporations have for inducing sexual dissatisfaction–are made responsible for preparing their own children for the difficult world of sex. This parental right over one’s children’s sexual education is what CBS decided to appropriate for itself–the better to sell them things when they turn 13 or 14. Whether Timberlake and Jackson revealed their plans to simulate sexual violence, television executives are not naïfs about capturing adolescents’ disposable income by addicting children to television before the teen years. The kiddie audience was the point of this show. Viacom made a conscious decision to show children soft-core pornography for profit.
Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has promised he will investigate CBS for indecency. For one thing, the FCC will issue subpoenas to see if Jackson is telling the truth about the accidental nature of her “costume reveal.” If one of the principals at the NFL, MTV, CBS, or Viacom could be held accountable as the mastermind behind this imposture, we would be delighted. But we not only doubt there is a mastermind, we doubt that this investigation will have any effect whatever. The FCC defines indecency as “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community broadcast standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities.” And as awful as the halftime show and the ads were, we think it’s hard to call them awful “by contemporary community broadcast standards for the broadcast medium.”
In fact, we’re not sure there’s any such thing anymore. The MTV executive who tried to explain the halftime show away by saying, “These were artists really down the middle of the youth culture,” was not wrong. What is most objectionable about that show is not that Jackson’s breast was revealed but that what was meant to arouse us was the simulated violence of Timberlake’s tearing off her clothes. If this had failed to get a rise out of people, then perhaps next year there would have been a rape at the Super Bowl show, and the year after that a human sacrifice.
The idea that the humiliation of women is titillating appears to have been a big part of this Super Bowl’s marketing philosophy. In one Bud Light commercial, a draught-horse loudly farts into the face of a woman who is about to make out with her boyfriend on a sleigh ride. Apparently the target drinkership of Bud Light consists of solitary onanists who fantasize about violence. You may be too much of a loser to date this girl, the message seems to be, but you can still humiliate her!
MTV network president Judy McGrath said she was horrified by how things turned out. Sort of. “I’m mostly horrified,” she said, “at what I think would have been an entertaining, exciting great halftime show that ended so badly in five seconds none of us knew anything about.” Well, now that McGrath does know something about it, what does she plan to do? Mum seems to be the word. Why doesn’t CBS or MTV or Viacom apologize? Why don’t they fire someone? Or discipline someone? Or pretend to discipline someone?
Because there is a “banality of obscenity” at work. These corporate ignoramuses have, at root, no clue what people are up in arms about, although they’ll gladly apologize if you can convince them that people’s objections will cost them money. Since they don’t really believe they’ve done wrong, all their explanations come off as either euphemism, spin, or lying, meant to fend the yokels off. While executives referred to Jackson’s strip act as a “costume reveal,” Timberlake called it a “wardrobe malfunction.” (Malfunction, how? Bras don’t tend to have detachable cups. Jackson’s did. It seems to have functioned perfectly.) “Songs that have sexual content are a long tradition in music,” says MTV chairman (and apparently, cultural historian) Tom Freston. “You could make the case that the lyrics are sharper or rawer now.” Yes, you could make Freston’s case, too. If someone were paying you to.
McGrath doesn’t understand well enough what’s wrong even to put a brave face on the event. Not for her those alibis of porn merchants of yore, such as that “the breast is a thing of beauty.” No–like Timberlake she is “sorry” only to the extent that her misdeed will cost her money or prestige. The same goes for everyone across the Viacom empire who’s pronounced on this matter for an instant. As for the five-year-old girls across the country asking their fathers what erections are, no one even pretends to feel terrible about them. If there’s been a misjudgment, it’s not a moral misjudgment but a marketing misjudgment, and who could hold that against a guy?
You cannot make the American public, least of all its children, travel a gauntlet of pornography in order to celebrate what has become more or less a national holiday. Among the solutions that ought to be on the table as we discuss what to do about this calamitous spectacle is that of nationalizing the championship game. Prevail on the NFL to let any television station that wishes the right to do its own broadcast. That way, those who want a comment-free version of the game can watch C-SPAN, those who want color commentary can watch one of the networks, and those who want a peep show can watch CBS.
Shame on Viacom that it disgraced the country in front of hundreds of millions of foreigners watching the Super Bowl for the first time (including in China). But shame on us if we permit them to do it again.
–Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors
