Maybe the culture really has been lost. Maybe it’s hopeless. Pop
culture, at least, is so crass, so vile, so lacking decency or
restraint, as to appear irredeemable. And the Super Bowl, the grand
pageant of Emperor-with-no-clothes Roger Goodell, provided crowning
evidence of the culture’s pungent rot.
It wasn’t the game itself that offended — the game was well
played and thrilling — but rather the halftime show and the
commercials and so much else of the trash that surrounded the game
itself like a Superfund site bordering a family park. Indeed, this
is the third straight year that the halftime show featured artists
known for tastelessness or offensiveness performing
hyper-sexualized songs while writhing in various stages of
Bacchanalian undress.
Really, does the NFL need to be booming “Bootylicious” into the
homes of 100 million people? (“I don’t think you’re ready for this
jelly… ’cause my body’s too bootylicious for you, baby.”) In fact,
the full lyrics for almost every song from Beyoncé’s set list are
full of raw, over-the-top sex — lyrical soft porn, if you will —
while the writhing on stage had little more decency than a Roman
orgy.
The year before, it was Madonna on stage, fresh from years of
outraging the Catholic Church with deliberate affronts the church
considered blasphemy. If memory serves, she left little to the
imagination in her halftime show. And the year before that, the
Black-Eyed Peas sang from their decidedly R-rated songs that
contain such lyrics (in the full song) as: “Niggas wanta hate on
us/ niggas be envious…. Nobody got nuttin’ on us (no)/Girls be all
on us. From London back down to the US/We rockin’ it (contagious),
monkey business (outrageous)/ Just confess, your girl admits that
we the sh**.”
Meanwhile, in the commercials, morning-after-sex scenes
(complete with handcuffs) vied with guys handling women’s panties
and Calvin Klein underwear leaving almost nothing to the
imagination.
Look, there is such a thing as being cleverly risqué. And on the
other side, there is a difference between prudishness and
commonsensical decency. Nobody likes a prude, and most reasonable
people don’t mind a little bit of sly suggestiveness. (The Kate
Upton commercial about the car wash, if you saw it, accomplished
the latter, very creatively.) But there are seven-year-olds aplenty
watching the Super Bowl, and most of the game, after all, is in the
“family hour” of a Sunday night. Is it really too much to ask the
NFL not to accept ads that lead tykes to ask, “Daddy, what’s a
‘perv,’ and why is that guy feeling around that girl’s yellow
underwear?”
Everywhere one looks, the former “family hours” are full of rot.
Flipping through channels the other day, I happened upon a rerun
from Cougar Town. Ya just gotta love it when a mother’s
friend offers the mother to take the virginity of her 15 year-old
son, who has been openly ogling the friend’s breasts holding up the
two letters “O” in an “Ohio” t-shirt — and the mother declines
only because her friend might just be too wild for her son’s first
time.
The feeling was similar
a few years back when I happened upon Two and a Half Men
as a late-middle-aged woman bragged to her son about her plans to
“get laid” that night, and then proceeded to urge her son to bed a
married woman in order to break up the woman’s marriage so the
mother (the “get laid” lady), a real-estate agent, could sell that
other woman’s house.
And thank goodness I didn’t actually get to see the 30
Rock episode where a group of MILFs competed for the favor of
8th Grade boys.
State universities hold public
forums on “The Female Orgasm”; pop tarts sing about all the
other kids wanting to “If You Seek Amy” (phonetically: F-U-*-* me);
and prime-time TV shows indiscriminately use words
once considered vulgar and frequently refer
to masturbation, orgasms, and private body parts. So maybe it is no
wonder that sex is treated as such a cavalierly negotiable
commodity that ever-growing percentages of those under 40 rate
“faithfulness” as not among the most important factors for
a successful marriage.
One need not be a prude to lament these trends. One can want
homage paid to older standards — even if sometimes honored only in
the breach — without wanting to interfere in any way in anybody
else’s private lives. And one need not be a defeatist to worry that
the cause of traditional decency may be doomed.
Of course, trends can change. They have before. Political party
strength flows and ebbs; cultural indicators fall and rise;
sometimes, pursuits that seemed edgy and exciting become passé. And
while of course modern society will never see anything even
approaching universal adherence to, say, Victorian standards (which
themselves were breached almost as often as honored), it should not
be too much for all of us to refuse to reward cultural rot with our
money, our time, or our tacit acceptance.
Surely there are others still under 50, or maybe even under 40,
who feel like old fogeys when listening to Beyoncé writhe
half-dressed while singing something almost indecipherable about
how her “texture is the best fur/I’m chinchilla” (huh?!?!?). Surely
there are those who don’t want children absorbing this stuff. And
surely, surely, a market correction will somehow create at least a
semi-happy medium, in which the trash and filth isn’t quite so
public — and in which it no longer enjoys the support of the
NFL.
Photo: UPI
