One lady shows a bit of tit and the whole country shifts direction. Since the infamous "nipplegate," our entire lifestyles have changed. Four letter words used to be bad; now five letter words are bad too! Cackles have been raised to an all time high. Howard Stern is slowly losing market share. The word for a female dog has been stricken from popular use; even Snoop Dogg doesn't say it anymore for fear of being ostracized. Yet you can still get your daily dose of blood and gore on prime time TV. What's going on?
I thought that the goal here was to progress. Wasn't the plan to get to a point where even so-called bad words could be used to express unique thought? George Carlin already made fun of American culture for the seven bad words (in the 70's no less); do we really need to hear that spiel again?
Who are we protecting from these so-called bad words and images? The children already know the bad words - they even know how to censor themselves around adults. And the children eventually get their hands on risque materials. Remember when you were a kid and found that copy of Playboy/National Geographic/Cosmo/Sweet Valley High/Hustler and discovered a whole new dimension to your life? Working with your hands, otherwise known as puberty! I thought that was a good part of growing up. Is puberty now relegated to those 18 and over? Or are they fighting to change the age to 21?
All the parents reading this are now rolling their eyes, with the common response that I am only saying this because I am childless. "When you have a child," they retort, "you will be just as concerned about your kids - or at least you should be." Yes, yes, why not through in the extra little guilt that if I don't conform, I will be a bad parent. But I disagree with this conventional wisdom. My dad taught me the proper use of curse words (including when not to use them) at the tender age of 7. If you were to check my permanent record, you'd see that I was never in trouble for using bad words against a teacher or schoolmate. I found my first Hustler before I was ten (thank you superintendent of my apartment complex growing up), and it didn't turn me into a raving sexual freak.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
James, interesting and thoughtful as always. There are several things going on here: nipplegate was just the catalyst for something that had been building for some time, so to look at what has happened since and say "how could this have caused that" is seeing just the tip of the iceberg.
I think the media companies HAVE overreacted in an ass kissing attempt to curry favor with the FCC and to "prove that they are taking the public's will seriously."
Beyond that, between premium cable, the Internet, shock jocks, etc, people do feel they should have places they can go and not be assaulted with prurience - I think that's what this is about.
And I agree kids are smart and can handle a lot, but do we want them to think this kind of programming is the norm? Because that's what the reaction is against.
2 - James Golden
Its funny that you characterize media as wanting to appear to "take the public's will seriously" when the biggest sellers of any media venue more often than not deal in sex or violence (sometimes with a little drugs thrown in for good measure). It begs the question, what is the public's will.
A few years ago I published an NYC lifestyle webzine. We were generally shunned by ad companies. While we had an extremely appealing demographic and lots of original content, we were often labelled as "porn." Our content was much less racy than anything in cosmo magazine, it had no pics of naked ladies, yet it was somehow labelled porn because the content wasn't necessarily "family content" (what would you expect from an NYC lifestyle zine).
Another interesting thought, this morning, as I was riding into work, Ludacris' Southern Hospitality song was on. A snippet of the lyrics are as follows:
Hand me down flip flops hand me down socks
Hand me down drug dealers hand me down rocks
Interestingly, the word "drug" was blotted out, but "rocks" was apparently OK for public consumption. But anyone with a brain can tell what Luda is talking about, rocks, crack rocks. Does anyone actually believe that a kid listening to this doesn't know what he is referring to?
Language is too diverse, too expressive, too adaptable for us to sit around and say, this word is bad, that word is good. All words, depending on context, could be bad. What's next? The censorship of ideas?
3 - Eric Olsen
Remember, this is specifically about the public airwaves, for which some rules are not inappropriate. Are they arbitrary to a certain extent? Yes, almost all rules are.
4 - James Golden
Would Rue Mclanahan (sexpot on golden girls) or Delta Burke (sexpot on Designing women) be allowed in modern day television given the new sensitivities?
5 - Eric Olsen
Of course, very little has really changed. And you can still get away with murder after 10pm.
6 - Natalie Davis
Actually, you can find plenty of murder and violence on the tube before 10 PM.
I'm generally with you, James, with one quibble: Not all parents reading this are rolling their eyes.
7 - boomcrashbaby
People worry about what Janet's breast will do to the kids, but I think the kids are more likely to be negatively influenced by the over-reaction to it.
One problem with only regulating broadcast channels is that it constrains some members of a competition to rules others are not bound by. Already TV shows like CSI, bound by regulations, has to compete with shows like Six Feet Under. Broadcast sitcoms have to compete with the Comedy Channel's South Park, etc.
Perhaps there is no perfect solution short of having broadcast networks only put on shows which won't offend anybody. (Which'll never happen). There are some of us who are less offended at having our daughter see a full grown female booby and more offended at her having to see Pat Robertson's ugly mug.
8 - Mac Diva
I am not a conspiracy theory type of person at all. Usually causality is traceable. But, I must wonder if all this razzle dazzle about part of a breast accidentally shown on televison and cussin' on the radio is bread and circuses. People are being distracted from our becoming mired in a war that should not be going on at all and an economy that, though becoming more productive, is not favoring the average worker. Congress has acted to punish anyone who says bad words on the airwaves, but not to seriously question why we are in Iraq. It seems to me the entire citizenry, with the exception of the elite, is being played for a collective fool.
9 - Nick Jones
Has anyone else considered the irony that we are allowed to not only look at, but feed from, a breast for the crucial, formative first months of our lives, and then we can't be allowed to see one for the next decade-and-a-half or so?
Maybe that could explain some of the weirdness of American sexual mores...
10 - James Golden
I think that the prude police have been around since way before our dealings in Iraq. And lets face it, recessions happen. The fact is that during the height of an economic boom, our nation was engaged in a bi-partisan attack on our president for the god awful sin of getting a happy ending. They were even able to produce the DRESS ferchrissakes. Lets not forget that Mrs. Gore was the founder of the PMRC.