1. Nipplegate
I live currently in what is probably the bluest point of a very red state, and I am not one of the folks who was outraged by Janet Jackson's showing of skin at the Super Bowl a million years ago, or a hundred million, or whenever that actually was.
In fact few things strike me as more preposterous than the moral outrage some people managed to drum up in response to a breast whose nipple wasn't even visible. Very seriously I ask you: what's the big deal? Really, though. Stop and answer. Stand and deliver. Is it that kids saw it? Is that what got you so upset? Kids have all seen breasts before; they used to suck on 'em for food. Half of us have the darn things. They're body parts. So what's the big deal? Can somebody answer this? In some countries it's not unusual for women to sunbathe topless in public, and the only harm this has brought upon those people is that they can't necessarily speak English—but then neither can most of us in the States.
I go further: that folks can think a bared breast is the most upsetting thing they've seen on TV in a while (or even in the last three minutes) is sick—outrageous, even.
2. Morality and etiquette
Rules are O.K.; the important thing, though, is to distinguish between which rules are in place just for some kind of social structure and which rules are vital. There has to be some kind of difference in weight between, say, stabbing a stranger and exposing a breast. And I don't just mean that the one has to be seen as worse than the other, as the craziest of us will likely agree (stabbing's the worse one, in case you're unsure); I mean that the two are in different categories.
For example, you are supposed to say "thank you" when somebody passes you the salt. That's a good thing to do for several reasons, not least of which is that people expect you to do so and may be upset if you don't. But that's a matter of etiquette, not morality. And while one may follow the rules of etiquette for moral reasons (e.g., if it's all the same to you, why not hold the door for your mom if it'll make her happy?), the rules of etiquette are not themselves moral.*
So sick is our culture that subjects such as nudity and sex tend to be grouped under the heading of morality, even by many of us social liberals: we accept that categorization. What's up with that, people? We're not talking about rape, here. We're talking about consensual sex.† We're talking about our bodies, for crying out loud: the bodies! The big deal, folks—what is it?
Sure, you try not to go around showing your privates to people who aren't interested, and sure, it might not have been the most thoughtful thing in the world for Janet Jackson to show us what she had under her ridiculous outfit. But what she had under there was not evil. It was just a little floppy.
3. F**king crazy s**t
Janet Jackson is not the point, and neither are her breasts or your breasts or anybody else's breasts. There's just something very confused about our society, and I'd like to address that confusion before getting to the actual point of this article (which is in fact far less important than its disproportionately long introduction).
You can see the confusion in our nation's response to Janet Jackson's breast, and you can also see it in the nation's attitude toward "bad" words. When South Park used the word "shit" something like 100 times in one episode, breaking a wholly arbitrary barrier in broadcasting, The New York Times had to dance around the subject like an Old West drunkard having his feet shot at: it turns out that "shit" mustn't be allowed to foul their pages. Here we have a newspaper incapable of reporting the news properly because that news concerns progress that the newspaper itself has not made, like a time-traveling caveman back from the future and grunting to his fellows about spoken language.
"Shit" is a word, a real word, that you can find in the dictionary. As with "please" and "thank you," we have to understand that people may be upset if we handle this the wrong way, but how important is it, ultimately? How worked up about a word—particularly a word that doesn't directly insult anybody—is it possible to get? Or rather, how worked up would it be possible for sane and reasonable people to get if they actually stopped and thought sanely and reasonably about it?
And how about the practice of replacing letters with asterisks? If I wrote a book called I Fucked Your Face, most publications would refer to it as I F**ked Your Face. Yes? Now explain that to me. The word's not supposed to be used, so we cover up some of the letters so that... what? So that nobody can guess what it says? Everyone knows what the word is. Would the U and the C make such a difference? Would those letters so scar our nation's youth?
Forgetting about the bizarre priorities involved,‡ we have to ask ourselves, again, what exactly the big deal's supposed to be and how exactly asterisks are making a difference. The only answer I can see is that the asterisks are a way for society to express its disapproval, to which I say: oh, come on. It's like the pictures that were all over the papers after the Super Bowl: in the U.S., Janet Jackson's breast was blurred or boxy; not so in the U.K. Those poor bastards in England were forced to see that it was an actual breast that was visible, whereas we in America were free to pray that, contrary to what we may or may not have had the ability to read in the corresponding captions and articles, it was only something harmless, like an enormous leech. Really, what's the point of censoring it? Is it not the fact of the baring of the breast, but rather the physical breast itself that is a problem?
Of course it is: breasts are evil.
4. Badness not allowed!
But so then just recently the FCC fined Fox more than $1 million because of nudity on a television show, Married by America, in spite of the fact that the nudity had been pixelated, because "even a child would have known that the strippers were topless and that sexual activity was being shown." The problem, the FCC finally acknowledges, is the very fact that nudity is going on, and America must be protected even from the awareness of it.
O.K., now we have a position that makes sense; unfortunately it's psychotic and—dare I say it?—un-American.
What makes America American? One thing is our far-too-often-shat-upon ideal of true freedom of speech. I'm afraid that most people think "freedom of speech" means the freedom of right people to say the right thing without being punished for it by wrong people who believe the wrong thing. This is inaccurate. The fact of the matter is that everybody gets to have beliefs—the bad people, too.§
Combine free speech with some of our cherished free-market capitalist ideals, and you may start to wonder why a television channel should be chastised for airing something that some folks might dislike when those folks can just change the channel and then never change it back again if they don't want to. If Coca-Cola started an ad campaign that said, "Stop drinking our soda, you goddamned Jews," we goddamned Jews could just boycott Coca-Cola. Yes? Coca-Cola would get in trouble whether or not the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (which recently chastised Sacha Baron Cohen for making fun of anti-Semites on Da Ali G Show) got sand in its pussy.‖
These days an opposite attitude predominates. This attitude is the same one that would have trouble wrapping its mind around the idea that even bad people should get free speech, and it's based around the idea that (a) there are clearly good and clearly bad things, (b) the best way to deal with this is to get rid of the clearly bad ones, and (c) if you can't get rid of the clearly bad things, you can at least put them under the carpet.
This is why you get sex-ed textbooks coming into public-school systems that do not mention condoms: if abstinence is obviously the better way to prevent pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases [which of course studies show otherwise –ed.], then why even let kids know that condoms are an option? It only complicates things! It'll just confuse the little dears!
The real problem with this attitude is that it is the same as—not just theoretically comparable to—the attitude that allowed the Soviets to remove political undesirables from photographs; it is, at its root, the same as when folks said [or say], "Negroes [or gays] can live their lives, just as long as they do it away from my kids"; it's what lets people run one-party states and straight-up dictatorships without seeing anything wrong about it. "I am right, so anything saying otherwise ought to be burned in this-here pile."
This is not democratic ideology. Democracy doesn't mean that you have a voice in our government only if I like you; it means that you have a voice in our government. Period.** And living in a democratic society means that you're just going to have to deal with things that you don't like as much, or you're going to have to look the other way. You can try to make sure that the things you don't like don't become law, don't come to dominate your government. But trying to make sure that things you don't like as much cease to exist just isn't kosher.††
Think about it. What is democracy if it isn't dissent? Sure, it's nice if occasionally everybody basically agrees about something. But, given that that doesn't often (or ever) happen, I ask again: what is democracy if it isn't dissent? I saw a billboard while driving from California to Texas that showed a bunch of folks at a parade or rally, and a little girl was waving an American flag,‡‡ and the ad said, "UNITY. It's what gives us strength," or something like that. Unity? Unity is what gives us strength? Huh. I forgot that the United States of America was opposed to—you know—checks, balances, all that bullshit. What do you know.
5. Here it is! The Brown Bunny Blowjob!
So, as I see it, there are two big reasons why it's (a) O.K. and (b) actually sort of a good thing that a film released in the United States should feature an actual blowjob that you can actually see a hip, famous actress actually perform.
Remember the reasons? For one thing, it just doesn't make sense in our society that it should be forbidden (and beyond that, it's good to introduce something a little different into our culture now and again—sort of like the reason it's not such a hot idea to get pregnant with your brother's baby). For another, and this reason is going to be phrased as a question for rhetorical purposes,§§ what is the big fucking deal? Women give blowjobs. Even men have been known to give blowjobs (if you can believe it)! This is just something people do sometimes. It's pretty normal at this point, and it's often a very nice, good thing. Unless sex or the human body are inherently evil, I am not sure why tongue-kissing is acceptable in a mainstream film and oral sex is not. Seriously: the distinction is arbitrary. In some countries even kissing is forbidden in film; isn't that silly? Oh, those silly foreigners.
Then there's a funny twist—because I would have said all of these things before seeing the movie. The funny twist is that the blowjob in this movie is not gratuitous.
Now, a lot of people don't know what "gratuitous" actually means: as with "explicit," they imagine it to be an intensifier that is applied indiscriminately to anything sexual. No: "explicit" means clear, not leaving much to the imagination, and "gratuitous" means for no good reason, for its own sake, uncalled-for, serving no function but to be there. ["As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my aunt Hortense, / to be smut it must be ut-terly without redeeming social importance." –ed.] Gratuitous is when a teen movie shows a bunch of girls soaping up in the shower for no reason; gratuitous is not when two people have just had sex and the woman's breasts are not concealed by a sheet.
So, for starters, you could argue that there's nothing gratuitous about showing an actual woman actually going down on an actual man in a movie if a blowjob is part of the story. That's something that you could argue. But as it happens, it makes sense in this particular film that the blowjob be real and not simulated. There are two main reasons for this, one of which is a "spoiler," so be careful now.
First of all, the protagonist keeps sort of picking up women, starting to get sexual with them, and then abandoning them weirdly. It works to have the first actual sexual contact be right there, explicit and real.
Second of all, and more importantly—and here comes the spoiler—it turns out that this blowjob isn't actually happening. It's a fantasy or a ghostly visitation—whatever you make of it, it isn't real. So how great is it that, whereas in most films something not real represents something real (e.g., every sex scene ever, where we are not meant to imagine that the main characters are only pretending to screw), here something real represents something not real. I man, it's no amazing stroke of revolutionary genius, but it's a cute touch! Here's this sex scene that isn't actually happening, but it sure is happening! It's great. I love it.
The rest of the movie's O.K., too. I don't know.
I'm done.
* Pop quiz: talking with your mouth full and beating up your nephew are both impolite. Which of the two is immoral?
† Incidentally, the reason why permitting gay sex doesn't create a slippery slope down to bestiality is that sheep can't give consent, same way children can't properly give consent. You know this!
‡ I've been told, for example, of a television broadcast of Blazing Saddles in which all the S-words and F-words had been taken out but the N-word had been left in. So you get stuff like, "[BLEEP] off, nigger." Bless your little hearts, FCC.
§ I thought it was very funny when The Onion wrote about the ACLU's defending the Nazis' right to burn down the ACLU's headquarters, but it was far more effective as comedy than as real satire: there isn't actually anything paradoxical about protecting the rights of people who don't like you. In fact, that's just a necessary evil if you're going to protect all people's rights—because some people don't like you. [Also of course burning down the ACLU's headquarters would be arson, which no civil-rights organization would defend. –ed.]
‖ I am Jewish! Hold your fire!
** Of course your voice doesn't count as much if you live in a more populated state than somebody else, but that's only fair.
†† See? Jewish!
‡‡ You know, like that photograph of the little girl waving the swastika flag at the Hitler parade in Nazi Germany: cute stuff.
§§ Let's call it a "rhetorical question."
0 comments:
Post a Comment