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Janet, Justin superbowl "stunt", US culture & marriage

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Adam
Feb 05 2004
07:21 pm

Frankly, this stunt concerns me about as much as a hangnail. Here’s why:

First of all, I don’t really consider the Great Revelation of The Breast to be all that different from what was already going on in the rest of the show. It was pretty much all pornography, if you ask me. If your kids were watching it, they absorbed such nuggets of culture as Kid Rock wearing an American flag as a shirt—and if you don’t know what his appeal is, well, do an internet search—so we can equate his trashy schlock (love that word) with America itself; plus, what Justin and Janet were doing before the GRoTB—that is, grinding and making overt sexual gestures—was just about as promiscuous as the stunt itself.

Second, and tied in to the first, the backlash against all this has called more attention to this example of promiscuity than I thought possible. They’ve gone so far as to ban a former bandmate of Justin’s from performing at an awards show. CBS says MTV will never host another halftime show. Janet doesn’t get to go to the Grammy’s. The stunt has become the number one all-time most requested search item on the internet. Without this little incident, we would have swallowed all of that halftime crap whole, and so would our kids. But as it is, the outcry has been immense. There’s exposure. To me it smacks of hypocricy to raise such a stink about this in light of the crap that’s been filling the airwaves for decades—commercials, music videos, sitcoms, you name it.

PS—MTV and CBS claim they knew nothing of it beforehand, and Janet says it was added after the last rehearsal.

By the way, don’t they have tape delay to protect against this sort of thing?