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Friday, February 06, 2004
The Great NippleGate Backlash II As CBS, NBC and ABC all shifted broadcast plans in reaction to the racy Super Bowl halftime show, Janet Jackson's publicist said she may back out of Sunday's Grammy Awards and Justin Timberlake admitted his own family was offended by the pop stars' stunt -- but not, you know, by all the fine Peruvian blow the guy's probably been snorting off the tailbones of all the teenage groupie flesh he's been scoring for the past half decade. Oh my. Oh did I say that out loud? Timberlake insisted he thought only Jackson's bustier would be revealed, not her breast. He said he understood "how unfortunate this is," which we can all translate to mean, why yes it was completely staged and fully planned and she asked me to do it and we knew it would happen and it was indeed a sleazy stupid lowbrow stunt, but then again, so is the goddamn war, so is Dick Cheney's sickly evil sneer, and what the goddamn hell is wrong with you people, it's just a breast, and did no one see Mike Ditka throwing a football through a tire to advertise erection pills? You want a disgusting image? Three words: Mike Ditka erection. Thank you and good night. The Great NippleGate Backlash IV Terri Carlin wants to make Janet Jackson's bare breast into a federal case. Carlin filed a proposed class action lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Jackson, singer Justin Timberlake, MTV, CBS and Viacom. Carlin alleges that she and others who watched the halftime show during Sunday's Super Bowl were injured by the performers' lewd actions. Carlin charges that the exposure and "sexually explicit conduct" by other performers during the show injured viewers. "As a direct and proximate result of the broadcast of the acts, (Carlin) and millions of others saw the acts and were caused to suffer outrage, anger, embarrassment and serious injury," the lawsuit says. But Carlin, who works in a bank and hasn't had sex in roughly 157 contiguous lifetimes, doesn't specify the type of injury allegedly suffered, mostly because she has no idea how to translate all the little voices screaming in her head in Aramaic and is a rather scary sad whiny trembling little thing whom you sort of look at and wonder just how the hell she survived on this planet for this long, how she even speaks in semi-coherent sentences, how she even manages to get out of her oddly stained nail-ridden bed in the morning, or how she eats or uses the bathroom without screeching and panicking and bashing her cute head into the pink floral-print wallpapered wall over and over again until she either faints or starts singing showtunes in the voice of one of Alvin and The Chipmunks. Which, come to think of it, she undoubtedly does. The Great NippleGate Backlash V Waves from the Janet Jackson Super Bowl fiasco reached Hawaii, as the NFL replaced one of Justin Timberlake's bandmates in the Pro Bowl halftime show. All right that's just about enough of this. The NFL bounced JC Chasez -- a member of 'N Sync -- from Sunday's halftime because of Jackson and Timberlake's breast-baring exhibition, said a spokesman for the NFL's annual all-star game, because they're simpering prickmonkeys. The current single from Chasez's debut album is "Some Girls (Dance With Women)." Another of his songs is "All Day Long I Dream About Sex" because that is just so cute. It was unclear what song he was to perform at the Pro Bowl, but it's fairly certain it wasn't "Hey Ya Guess Which NFL Player is Secretly Gay." It is also unclear just why the hell this stupid nipple stunt has taken on seemingly epic reactionary proportions, given how it will last approximately three more days after which it will immediately fall off the cultural radar because Tom Cruise will finally come out and admit he's the gay lover of fellow creepy Scientologist cultist John Travolta, or something, or maybe Michael Jackson will confess to having stolen the tiny thin nose cartilages of nubile albino teenage boys, or the Vatican will finally reverse its lifeloing devotion to homophobia and misogyny and patriarchal BS and come out and say hey you know what? Screw this. Sex is goddamn amazing and gay sex is fabulous and the resurrection of the divine feminine is our new passionate irrefutable global cause, and let's get the hell out of these stifling robes and everyone into the Holy Hot Tub and everybody dance now goddammit. And then everyone's attention will instantly divert and Janet's sunburst nipple will be an instant footnote, cultural vapor, a smudge on the heel of our fickle and oversaturated memory, yay yay whee bye bye bye. Thursday, February 05, 2004
Curse Words For Janet Jackson Daddy, why does that f--ing politician hate women's breasts? Because he's a s-- and a hypocrite, honey By Mark Morford Jaws were clenched. Brows were furrowed. Scowls were scowled. Fake sanctimony was hissed. Pasty cellulitic butts were scrunched. This is what happened. Just last week, well before Janet Jackson reignited her limp career in the most nipple-riffic PR stunt in months, uptight members of Congress from all corners squeezed their narrow ideologies into little fiery balls and decided to berate, as they so often do, radio and TV for being "vile, crude, disgusting, and awful," yo hey pot kettle black. And, lo, lightning did not strike them dead on the spot. Why the outburst? Because Bono said the delicious f-word during the Golden Globes, and it wasn't edited out. Because a few of the country's crude 'n' obnoxious Clear Channel shock-radio stations you would never listen to because you have taste and a brain aired one of those vapid sexist gag radio bits that appeal only to semicatatonic homophobic frat boys. Oh, and because S.F.'s own KRON-TV dared to accidentally flash a shot of a real penis during a segment about the very much not-all-that-funny "Puppetry of the Penis" theater show. Shocking. Appalling. Honey cover your eyes. And thus did the sanctimonious pseudo-Christian cry go out, powerful and time tested by politicians worldwide, guaranteed to induce fear and ignorance and allow them to paint themselves as all self-righteous and ethical and pretend they're not a corporate shill raping the environment from the back pocket of an oil lobbyist: Who -- pray, who -- will protect the children? So the politicians, they hissed, they derided, they wrapped themselves in cloaks of hypocrisy and righteousness and proposed a bill to quintuple the Federal Communication Commission's powers to punish "crude, vile" media violators -- i.e., anyone who broadcasts certain "forbidden" swear words or exposes genitalia or offers up crude schlock-radio pap, as if these are the true demons of society, the true leeches sucking the souls of the virtuous and the young. Wrong again, pols. Which leads us, naturally, straight to Janet Jackson's nipple. To the instantly infamous fully intentional breast-exposing PR stunt wherein Justin Timberlake "accidentally" ripped off one of Janet's breast plates, exposing one actually quite cool silver sunburst nipple shield, just before a panicky NBC cut to a much more morally virtuous Pepsi commercial. Once again, America was shocked and appalled. Families were horrified. Civilizations trembled. Churches crumbled. Eighty-nine million viewers gasped and made the sign of the cross and realized just how desperate Janet's career must've been that she had to try to pull that one off. So to speak. And oh yes, children were traumatized, too. Deeply scarred. Forever and ever. So very sad. Because children are always traumatized by such events, aren't they? The wee ones simply can't handle sex and nudity and swearing and it's a wonder the damn little things can get out of bed in the morning, what with all the f-words and exposed nipples and penises flopping around out there. Right, senator? The poor dears. Thank god for Spongebob. So outraged was the populace that Michael Powell, sanctimonious head of the FCC, he of the flagrant corporate whoring who recently tried to cram through new rules that would've allowed a handful of media giants to own almost every media outlet in the nation, is actually launching a probe into the Janet episode. How cute. This is the message: A woman's bare breast is a horrific and disturbing thing, completely inappropriate for an afternoon of wholesome macho homoerotic skull-bashing NFL violence and endless hours of nauseating commercial crassness -- unless the woman is, you know, a cheerleader. Now rush off to bed kids, and read your Bibles while Mommy and Daddy pop some Zoloft and Levitra and crack a few Bud Lights and head off to the fetish dungeon to lick our new Ford GT. Got it. Yes, a woman's flesh is unspeakable evil. However, umpteen erectile-dysfunction commercials and crotch-biting pisswater Bud Light commercials and toxic-junk-food commercials and faux-macho truck commercials and the ad featuring two old people beating each other up over a bag of greasy potato chips, why, that's just tasteful, healthy capitalism. Is that it, Mike? Politicians? Just want to be clear. Because there is no outcry. There are no snide FCC honchos or uptight politicians hurling the terms "vile," "disgusting" and "crude" at the true poisons of the culture, like those above -- not to mention politicians' own oil cronyism or easy lies about war, or the decimation of our foreign policy. You want to talk vile and disgusting, senator? Have you seen the new BushCo budget? Most telling side note: Bono, of U2, was barred from performing a song about AIDS awareness at the Super Bowl because he is "too political," given how he fights for those horrible un-American causes of peace and Third World debt relief. But pseudo-gangsta P. Diddy can pimp like a talentless thug and Kid Rock can, well, be Kid Rock and NFL players can kneel in smarmy bogus prayer rituals, praying fervently to crush the other team's vertebrae and win a shiny trophy. My God but we are so beautifully, deeply screwed. Mind, this is no impassioned defense of vulgar radio or tacky overblown halftime stunts, which are, by American tradition, inane and insulting on 157 levels. After all, a nation gets exactly the type of schlock entertainment it deserves. And, as for the children, well, if you let your 5-year-old listen to Howard Stern, you get exactly the kind of kid you deserve, too. But in the final analysis, which is more harmful to your innocent unsoiled perfect child? Hearing Bono say "this is really fucking brilliant" during the Golden Globes and ogling Janet Jackson's PR-happy breast for all of 1.7 seconds, or the endless stream of blood-soaked images of BushCo's bogus war machine interspersed with never-ending commercials featuring misogyny, bestiality, cheap beer and toxic sodas, along with arrays of pneumatic bleached-toothed cheerleaders doing the splits while sweaty 300-pound men in tights pulverize each other like gorillas on meth? Verily, congressman, and truly, Mr. Powell, why are you not out there screaming and clenching your fists and protecting our innocent children from the endless array of sociocultural lies and abuses and corporate whorings you yourselves support and help perpetuate? Why are you not, in short, ranting about the need to protect our children from the likes of, well, you? 
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