/ Mark Frauenfelder / 10:28 am Wed Sep 16, 2009

The US Government's bizarre obsession with Janet Jackson's nipple

This, in all sincerity, is what I expect in return for my taxes: a five-year-long absurdist theater performance about a magically, awesomely, mesmerizingly powerful nipple that was revealed for less than one second to millions of half-drunk spectators on a Sunday afternoon in 2004. The budget: Millions of dollars and rising. Starring: the FCC, the highest court in the United States, major media companies, and a cast of thousands of lawyers. Script: A 12-foot-high stack incomprehensible legal documents. I hope the show never ends. Bravo!
The commission also reasserted that the reveal was off limits for broadcast TV between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. "[The FCC] reasonably determined in this case that the graphic and shocking, albeit brief, exposure of Janet Jackson’s bare right breast to a nationwide audience composed of millions of children and adults was indecent," the FCC said.

Back in June, the court asked for new briefs in the case after the Supreme Court's May 4 decision to vacate the Third Circuit's ruling that the Jackson fine was arbitrary and capricious.

The FCC relied  heavily on the Fox decision in its brief, saying that "as the Fox Courts interpretation of the pertinent regulatory history now makes clear, the  repetition requirement that exempted fleeting expletives from enforcement has  no logical application to images."

We have always been at war with the one-second glimpse of Janet Jackson's nipple

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  5. I think the only fair solution here is to remove football from TV programming forever. Or maybe to put it into the 2:00-4:00AM slot would be OK. We’ll have to do a study and get back to you.

  6. A funny thing me and my girlfriend noticed the other day was, her nipple isn’t even that visible.

    She has a shield on, making it much more like a pastied boob than a fully exposed breast.

    And don’t get me started on the ridiculousness of censoring one piece of skin rather than another, located just millimetres away.

  8. I think the american people have an issue with breasts. Really. I have seen a lot of very weird things about it. For instance the poor Atom kid who has to wear a shirt in the american movie (he used not to). Or also, a friend of an international palace in Paris told me they had to put bras to painted women on a wall : it was not the saoudi customers who obtained that (they didn’t ask) but the prude americans !
    Damm it we are mammals (with mammary glands) are we not ?

  9. hee! Later it will emerge she had it surgically removed years earlier and all America saw was the idea of a nipple.

  10. I think the main problem with the wardrobe malfunction is that most red blooded Americans didn’t want to see Janet Jackson’s tits, and having it forced upon them was the crime in question.

  14. Yeah, that is bizarre. . . haven’t they ever seen her ankles, her sexy sexy ankles?

    (Oh god, now I can’t stop thinking about them. . . I gotta go. . . uhhh. . . do something.)

  15. So millions of children saw (assuming they didn’t blink) that Janet Jackson is also in possession of a body part that they sucked on for months and have two of themselves. I consider this both “shocking” and “indecent.”

    Thanks FCC. How about you get back to your job, fining high school students $30k for swearing on their 5W radio stations with no listeners or whatever it is you do?

  21. Um, that nipple murdered America’s innocence, and we can never get that back. We can’t un-know that Janet Jackson is a mammal. We live in a different world, now. A darker, meaner world.

    Janet Jackson’s nipple is history’s greatest monster.

  22. This reminds me of the current obsession over Joe Wilson. Spending taxpayer dollars and wasting government time on each part of the government deciding whether or not they want to officially frown at a guy for acting like a child. Isn’t there anything more important to worry about?

  23. The annoying thing is that the bare breast (and yes, I seem to remember that she was wearing something over the nipple) was, by far, the _LEAST_ objectionable thing about that whole halftime show. The song was inappropriate, the so-called dancing was inappropriate, the guy earlier wearing a flag was inappropriate…

    The most important lesson was learned long before this got to the FCC: Never let MTV run the halftime show again; it drives away viewers and makes the advertisers unhappy.

    As far as why a bare breast bothers anyone: Best I can figure is that the legislators were all bottle babies.

  25. It is a bit puzzling.

    Males can go bare chested without fear of.. well, FCC fines, anyway.

    So what’s obscene here? the potential for milk?

  26. I object to the idea that lawyers have to “feed their children”. Ridiculous.

    We all know they feed on children.

  28. You sad, sad Americans.

    You know, there are countries -Scandinavian countries- where a celebrity anus slip is entirely forgotten in mere days.

  29. The last thing I want my children to see is a human nipple. That’s why I blindfold them every time my wife breastfeeds.

  30. 2 things:

    1. The nipple was never shown, there was a pasty type thing covering it.

    2. The real reason for the uproar is that Football is homoeroticism and under NO circumstances shall overt female sexuality be exhibited.

    Thanks.

  32. @24: Yes, I agree. Can anyone here resist humor and explain *why* some cultures like the US find exposure of the female nipple such a shocking thing? (Perhaps shocking is not the right word.) A woman’s cleavage is fine, sideboob is fine, and underboob is ok but difficult given physics. But *the nipple* is forbidden, even though all human beings have two of them. Is it something sexual but not milk-related? Is it capitalism and the objectification of women’s breasts, where we can see the top/side/bottom of the breast, but the nipple is the payoff? Honestly I don’t get it, but, clearly this is a big deal to a lot of people (whether you agree with them or not).

  33. Five years.
    Hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.
    And God-only-knows how many hours of collective brainpower.
    For 0.4 seconds of a pastied tit.

    *Smacks forehead*

    You know what? This really heartens me. It does. Because my immediate and unprintable reaction just affirms that I’m not as cynical as I d feared.

    I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t and won’t comment on the legal nature of the matter. As a human being though, I find the FCC’s language is offensive. “Reckless” is a word concerning matters of human life and limb. Not boobs.

    Decency, FCC. Just because you can spell it doesn’t mean you understand it.

  34. OK horribly skewed perspective from a Canadian of immediate European descent here, but in Canada you can get actual nekkid boobies anytime after dark (or in news or talk-show health coverage)

    Full nudity (back AND front) and occasionally even male, in the wee hours. Our standards seem to be related to the preponderance of complaints. Don’t show the penis too early in the art flick, and the insomniac busybodies will have flipped away! See, no problem!

    So the other day I saw a copy of Blade in prime time. Fountains of blood totalling hundreds of gallons, people being dismembered, misanthropy of the highest order, and they bleep the word ‘shit’? Really?!

    In spite of the minutes-long silent bits, I still saw a strong language warning too.

  35. We seem to have not moved on one iota from the nineteenth century, when ‘respectable’ (scientific, medical, statistical) obsession over black women’s sexual anatomy was de rigeur.

  36. Since people are talking about the shield like a pastie – it was a common design of shield that does not cover the nipple but is held in place via a piercing. The shield itself was purchased at a well known shop in Houston (owned by an acquaintance of mine) just before the superbowl. The brevity of the exposure made the nipple hard to see but as a still image it is readily apparent (though some people seem to lose it in the middle of the shield)

    Coincidentally, I just recently spent some time re-visiting my old columns for BME which included this one about the incident:

    http://www.bmezine.com/news/lizardman/20040204.html

  37. The real crime here is interrupting our ritualized violent warfare with something that represents nurturing and femininity. Come on, cities are battling for a made-up ‘championship’ here! Males are bonding across the country, and they can’t talk to each other about anything but football…

    And it wasn’t the televising of the halftime show that caused the problem, it was the endless super-slow-motion replays put on every news outlet, making it seem as if a substantial part of the show was devoted to flashing America.

    I wonder just how many complaints really came in, and how many of them are cut from the same exact template, sent from the same set of IP addresses or ZIP codes?

  40. OK, I’m still trying to comprehend the “Scandinavian celebrity anus slip” over here.

    Don’t tell me. I don’t really want to know. My mind is sufficiently boggled.

  41. I think what’s most disturbing about this ‘controversy’ is what I’ve pretty much never heard anyone discussed: the fact that what was shown was a man yanking off a woman’s top in public without her conset. Now, clearly it was planned and at least the two performers new about it. But in the entire nipplegate discussion, then or now, nobody was saying, ‘Hey kids, anyone who’d intentionally do this to a woman in public is likely to go to jail.’

  42. Personally, I think we should give the nipple its own tv show: “The Janet Jackson’s Nipple Hour” — I mean, why not? Better than most of what’s already on the boob tube.

  43. I wonder if there is a way for some kind of level of absurdity cutoff for any lawsuit. It would be entertaining if it wasn’t costing us all so much money. Lawyers. sigh

  44. How much consensus could we come to a group that “obscenity” regulation is inherently nonconstructive and might need to be outright abolished, or severely curtailed?

    The lingering remnants of the Comstock Act and its ilk have demonstrably done the US a lot more harm than good since its inception… at one point even causing harm to the availability of prophylactics.

    Honestly, as long as free speech isn’t actively causing people harm why do we need to regulate it? If something “lewd” happens during an NFL show, let the NFL be responsible for it by answering directly to the public. Leave the FCC to regulating important communications law, like ownership of frequencies, net neutrality, etc.

  45. The government only cares because there’s several million idiots running around who think that kids will somehow be traumatized by seeing something that pretty much everybody on the planet has two of.

  47. Frankly, if I don’t see boobies or hear “fuck” within twenty minutes of turning on the TV, I change channels!

  52. The FCC wastes buckets of taxdollars persecuting CBS for an accidental, 0.4 second aereola exposure. In the mean time, broadcast volume level enforcement no longer exists. I’m getting damned tired of cranking the volume up to 30 to hear the stupid movie only to have to hussle to hit “mute” before the explosion in volume blows out my families ear drums.

    Note to advertisers: screaming at us makes us tune you out and/or change the channel.

  53. The legal system is obsessed with money and sex. Our legal system also moves as slowly as an glacier. This is because our legal system hasn’t evolved very much from two or three hundred years ago. That is why the more the pressing items of modern concern (to you and I) get second priority.

  54. Was there ever regulation of the volume level of TV broadcasts?

    I’ve had companies yelling in my face via the TV as long as I can remember.

  55. Airpillo @ 55:
    Broadcast levels were a super big deal when I was in college (1990-1995) and a student radio DJ. That and swearing were the greatest concerns for student radio. Maybe the broadcast level enforcement disapeared with the appearance of Bush and “regulation is bad, m’kay?” attitudes that came with him.

  56. #55: In fact, there are regulations about how much the commercial’s volume level can differ from that of the program (not to mention some technical limitations). So what the commercials do is change the equalization to make the sound “brighter”, and compress the heck out of the audio so everything is running much closer to the maximum amplitude.

    In other words, it’s not so much louder as ruder.

    At that, I’ll take TV commercials over annoying animated ads on websites. If it wasn’t for those and the pop-overs, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to run an ad-blocker.

    1. If it wasn’t for those and the pop-overs, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to run an ad-blocker.

      It’s Darwinism in action (I hope.) If advertisers get the clue that people run adblockers because of the toxic scripts and slow-loading animations rather than the ad content, maybe they’ll go back to flat ads.

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