Janet Jackson's Super Bowl Half-Time breast-exposing exhibitionism earns condemnation.

Feb. 2, 2004: PoliSat .Com's Political Satire/ Commentary* Daily Update # 01·· ™©·2004·(Home)·
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Janet Jackson's Super Bowl Half-Time breast-exposing exhibitionism earns condemnation.·

Super Bowl XXXVIIIs

I'm Janet, the Jackson, who's straight.
For Super Bowl Game XXXVIII
my Half Time Revue
gave children a view
revealing my bare XXXVIII's.

I must say I'm shocked and surprised
that parents complained to The Eye
to say they detest
my baring my breast
at Half Time for boys' and girls' eyes.

I'm simply an atrist who grooves
on showing your children my boobs
without feeling shame,
and if you complain,
you're Fascist, tyrannical goons.

Entertainment as an art, is in the eye of the beholder, but message is in the mind of the entertainer. Artists, as do most of the rest of us, often want our work to perceived as important to others rather than merely self-serving. Entertainers who aspire to be artists more than entertainers often crave recognition as being societal "educators." Their goal is to ingratiate themselves to a favored audience by shocking and/or offending a larger audience whose values they (and, they hope, their targeted audience) deem pedestrian. When they incur the wrath of the larger audience, they celebrate having ingratiated themselves to the target audience while feigning offense at what they deem the pedestrian values of those offended.

When only adults comprise an entertainer's target audience, our allegiance to free speech motivates those of us comprising the larger audience to expect, and tolerate, a wider scope of expression than when we perceive minors as a significant part of the target audience. Although evolution has produced small percentage of adults who, as statistical deviations from the norm, perceive pedophilia as a "norm," the rest of us perceive such behavior to be socially dangerous, morally repugnant and criminally offensive. Similarly, a vast majority of we who are parents consider premature sexual activity to be morally irresponsible and, in the age of AIDS, STD's, etc., to also be dangerous. Therefore, we, who are parents trying to strongly discourage such moral irresponsibility in our children are rightly offended when entertainers knowingly target our children as part of an audience to convey a message incompatible with the message of moral responsibility we're trying to convey to our children.

We don't expect (and don't want) public discourse on important social, political and moral issues to be limited to topics suitable for children of all ages, but with respect to events promoted as having entertainment value for the entire community (i.e., children as well as adults), we rightly have a different set of expectations. We don't expect such entertainment to demean, trivialize or offend the important moral values we're struggling to instill in our children.

Nudity is not inherently offensive. For example, not even young children are harmed by views of works of sculptors depicting the beauty of the human form. Few, if any, parents would be offended by their children viewing Michelangelo's David or the Spirit of Justice statue at the Department of Justice. In contrast, however, most, if not all parents, would be offended by their children being exposed to a display of such statues in a manner suggesting or promoting sexual activity or foreplay occurring between them because such display would intrude into the moral domain of the parent/child relationship.

The NFL, CBS, and to a lesser degree the morally irresponsible¹ MTV subsidiary of CBS's owner, ViaCom, promoted the Super Bowl (and half-time) as entertainment targeting a broad audience including children. The pre-Super-Bowl decision (in response to public criticisms) to limit to pay-for-view the "lingerie football" feature initially promoted as being planned as part of the half-time broadcast further reinforced expectations that the broadcast version of the half-time show would be suitable for such broad audience.

To have displayed the Spirit of Justice statue in a half-time show in which it would have been relevant to the performance would have been harmless, but just as displaying the same statue in a manner to suggest sexual foreplay between that statue and its male counterpart (also at the Department of Justice) would have irresponsibly intruded into the parent/child moral domains of the broader audience, Janet Jackson's exhibitionist exposure of her breast during a song suggesting sexual foreplay (and more) was both offensive and morally irresponsible in my opinion. With respect to the difficult struggle parents face in trying to provide moral structure for their children, Jackson may be "proud" to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

I, for one, will to my best to henceforth minimize the risk that the fruits of my labor become part of her, or MTV's, assets. Likewise, it would be suitable for adults in the broader to convey to the NFL in unequivocal terms that if such event were to occur in a Super Bowl half-time in the future, such parents would maximize their efforts to minimize the fruits of their labor ending up in the pockets of the NFL and sponsors of such Super Bowl event. It's called free speech and the liberty to expend one's own property in accordance with one's own preferences and to decline to subsidize "entertainment" that irresponsibly intrudes into the moral domain of the parent/child relationship. --Jim Wrenn, Editor at PoliSat.Com.

¹·When my children were young, I actually paid the cable company to block the MTV transmission because I perceived that too much of the "entertainment" on MTV irresponsibly intruded into the moral domain the parent/child relationship in our family. It didn't make me popular with my children at the time, but now that they've grown into such superb adults, my wife and I know (and I think our children know) we were right to have done so.

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