BLAME WHERE BLAME IS DUE

Just when I thought I was done talking and thinking about a certain event which occurred this past Sunday, I find an article by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on Beliefnet which brings up an angle I hadn’t previously considered:

Justin Timberlake, a man distinguished neither for his dance nor his music, decided to open Janet Jackson’s blouse and expose her breast. I’m not making this up. As soon as I saw it, I knew it had been planned, even though Janet gave this “shocked” look of surprise. Timberlake, who is locked in a permanent game of one-upsmanship with his former girlfriend, the vulgar Britney Spears, was looking to upstage the Britney-Madonna kiss. That’s what happens in a popular culture that has deteriorated to being almost entirely about empty sensationalism.

The rebbe is on to something. I hadn’t considered the possibility that this whole sordid mess was cooked up as the latest battle in this lover’s spat which is only compelling to the TRL crowd. But it makes sense. Ever since their split, Timberlake’s had to live with the fact that his ex-girlfriend is a huge star (though why she is, is a mystery to me) while he’s just a pop-culture footnote.

Or, at least, he was. But no longer.

Boteach, who is certainly no prude, continues:

Madonna and Britney’s desperate attention-getting act, performed on a music awards show in sync with the perverted state of today’s music, seemed to blend right in. But Justin and Janet’s crude and offensive act was done during the Super Bowl half-time show, when all my kids were watching. My children looked confused and bewildered. What the heck was that? What is nudity doing on the Super Bowl? What is such disgusting behavior doing during a football game? How could the NFL allow the degradation of its flagship event? Is there really no level to which the modern culture won’t stoop?

Dear Rabbi:

No, there isn’t. Where there’s a nipple, even a rumor of a nipple, where there’s a beach loaded with bikini-clad women, where there’s a nice set of VPLs, there’s a sure-fire way to draw a crowd. And if you can draw a crowd, you can sell anything–even yourself. Everybody will look, everybody will talk, and everybody will profit if they can find a way to get into the income stream. I don’t understand why so many people are so willing to let marketers–the same people whose e-mail we purge from our inbox, the same folks whose phone calls we loathe–play our hormones like a mandolin. Who can stand being that much of a dupe? Shouldn’t people be ashamed to admit they’re fans of Timberlake, Jackson, Spears, Madonna, et al.? I can understand why 13-year-olds go ape-feces over this stuff–they have no real choice, they’re forced to conform by teen culture. But why do adults go in for it? That’s what I can’t figure out. It’s like walking around with I CANNOT CONTROL MY BASEST IMPULSES tatooed on your forehead.

Do the kids of America need to see Janet’s breast? Is there any way for me as a father to protect my five daughters from images of women inviting their own sexual exploitation just in order to appear in tomorrow’s tabloids?

Kill the media monster that made such exploitation possible in the first place? Just a thought.

Forget it–the culture war has led to its logical end. It’s the junior-high lunchroom, cool kids vs. geeks, and who wants to be on the side of the geeks? Even Beliefnet has bought into the concept that hipness is a greater good than rightness . . . just check out this quiz if you don’t believe me.

So we’ve got the world most of us wanted–a world where our sense of sexuality has devolved from something fun and playful into just another weapon in the advertiser’s arsenal. Why? Because we always look, even when we know it’s to our own detriment.

Sure, there’s plenty of blame to go around. We did live under unreasonable sexual repression for a long time in this country, and that in itself is a perversion. We took the basic goodness of sexuality, confused its intimacy with unspeakability, and wound up making a major leitmotif in nearly everyone’s life something that we’re all too afraid or ashamed to talk about.

But that, in and of itself, doesn’t make sexual desire go away. Being interested in sex when you’re a teenager (or an adult, for that matter) is like being interested in dinner during the evening. It is the proper response to the reality in which you find yourself. Prudery is not the right way to counteract the increased coarsening of American public life–that’s just rewarding the geeks. What’s called for is perspective, something that’s badly lacking from nearly every aspect of American life.

And that’s what’s missing in l’affaire bustier: the perspective that Boteach brings to this monumentally silly incident. From a reasonably detached perspective, we can see that there are three sets of fools in this situation: the fools on stage who think fame is better than being able to look at yourself in the mirror, the fools who let themselves be influenced by such cynical sexual manipulation, and the fools whose response to the offense brought by the situation is to punish rather than to chastize.

What our sick culture needs is not a blue ribbon commission to parcel out fines, nor does it need to engage in a public shunning of Jackson and Timberlake, nor does it need “nipple cops” at all the networks. What it needs are more people willing to expose Timberlake and Jackson as the impious frauds they are–a has-been and a never-was who both knew the only thing they had left to offer our culture was a freak show.

(Submitted for today’s BELTWAY TRAFFIC JAM.)