By Gary Earl Ross
Buffalo, NY – One need look no further than the recent media storm over Janet Jackson's mammary gland for proof that we have yet to come to terms with that bipolar sexuality disorder Amerisex. Sex sells everything in this country, but we must protect ourselves from it at all costs.
For the dozen of you who were sightseeing on Mars, a brief recap is in order. At the close of the Super Bowl halftime show, singer Justin Timberlake snatched off part of Janet Jackson's top, revealing a naked but bejeweled breast for an estimated 89 million viewers. The controversy began at once in living rooms all over America as viewers debated whether the event was staged or accidental. The discussions were less prosaic in my own living room, however, as my 16-year-old son and his friends argued about whose fault it was they had gone to the basement to shoot pool during halftime.
Having gone to my computer to add dialogue to a play-in-progress, I too missed the Breast Seen Round the World. But no one could escape what followed. For the next week the news media reported, speculated, explained, analyzed, dissected, inspected, and practically transsected Ms. Jackson's breast. The offensive footage was replayed endlessly, with pixillated blurring of that most offensive portion of the breast, the nipple. Clever writers dubbed the incident Bra-HaHa, the Grab, and Tempest in a C-Cup. The Leno and Letterman set milked it for all it was worth. ER pixillated the exposed breast of an elderly woman dying of pertussis after several affiliates threatened not to carry the episode, and FCC Chairman Michael Powell angrily called for an investigation.
Despite a century of National Geographic, a half century of Playboy, and the appearance of breasts, intentional or accidental, in movies and TV programs from the original King Kong to Roots to PBS to The World is Not Enough, is America so mammary-phobic that public breast feeding is still decried, that even news programs depicting life-saving mammograms must carry parental advisories, that our less than mentally balanced attorney general spends taxpayer dollars to cover the breasts on the Statue of Justice, that our FCC chairman can make a federal case out of two seconds of TV exposure? Whether accidental or a ploy to sell her new CD, did the Jackson affair deserve all the attention it got?
As a writer of stories sometimes called erotic, I don't know whether to be amused by the breast that launched a thousand quips or annoyed by our collective childishness. That this has sparked a national debate on decency proves that in America morality, which should involve so much more, begins and ends with sex. Lying about sex gets one president impeached. Lying to go to war might get another re-elected. Janet Jackon's breast is immediate cause for a federal investigation, but only after many months, billions of dollars, the loss of 600 American lives, and the complete absence of weapons of mass destruction will that same government reluctantly undertake an investigation into intelligence failures.
As the father of a soldier en route to Iraq, I have no trouble seeing the intelligence failures, and the boobs. It was a breast, America. Get over it.
Listener-commentator Gary Earl Ross is a professor at the U-B Educational Opportunity Center. His latest publication is "Lucky She's Mine," one of 23 short stories in the just-published Penguin Plume anthology "Intimacy."