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Friday, November 26, 2004

Stop me before I watch again!
Posted by Jill | 10:59 AM

When Frank Rich left the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, I was disappointed, because he can always be relied upon to be a voice of sanity in the wilderness. However, with the current drumbeat of so-called "moral values" on the part of the anti-sex minions on the right, Rich belongs right where he is: puncturing the balloons of hypocrisy among those who would return chastity belts to the wardrobes of women everywhere and once again tell boys that masturbation will make them go blind.

This week's column, which will appear in the Arts and Leisure section, is no exception. Once again, Frank Rich gets to the crux of the matter:


Rush Limbaugh, taking a break from the legal deliberations of his drug rap and third divorce, set the hysterical tone. "I was stunned!" he told his listeners. "I literally could not believe what I had seen. ... At various places on the Net you can see the video of this, and she's buck naked, folks. I mean when they dropped the towel she's naked. You see enough of her back and rear end to know that she was naked. There's no frontal nudity in the thing, but I mean you don't need that. ...I mean, there are some guys with their kids that sit down to watch 'Monday Night Football.' "

[snip]

Like the Janet Jackson video before it, the new N.F.L. sex tape was now being rebroadcast around the clock so we could revel incessantly in the shock of it all. "People were so outraged they had to see it 10 times," joked Aaron Brown of CNN, which was no slacker in filling that need in the marketplace. And yet when I spoke to an F.C.C. enforcement spokesman after more than two days of such replays, the agency had not yet received a single complaint about the spot's constant recycling on other TV shows, among them the highly rated talk show "The View," where Ms. Sheridan's bare back had been merrily paraded at the child-friendly hour of 11 a.m.

The hypocrisy embedded in this tale is becoming a national running gag. As in the Super Bowl brouhaha, in which the N.F.L. maintained it had no idea that MTV might produce a racy halftime show, the league has denied any prior inkling of the salaciousness on tap this time - even though the spot featured the actress playing the sluttiest character in prime time's most libidinous series and was shot with the full permission of one of the league's teams in its own locker room. Again as in the Jackson case, we are also asked to believe that pro football is what Pat Buchanan calls "the family entertainment, the family sports show" rather than what it actually is: a Boschian jamboree of bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction pageantry and, as Don Imus puts it, "wife-beating drug addicts slamming the hell out of each other" on the field.


The current hue and cry about "moral values" is just so much horse manure. The moral police of the red states are very concerned about the morality of other people, not about their own. Rush Limbaugh, with his three failed marriages and drug addiction, is in no position to talk about anyone else's moral values. Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas have the highest divorce rates. Abortion rates are the same in Texas as they are in Massachusetts.

I decided that I hated "Desperate Housewives", so I just don't watch it. But that's not enough for the morality police, they want anything that smacks of people enjoying sex purged from the cultural marketplace. You know why there's sex in movies and on television? Because people want it there. They respond to it. Television is about delivering eyeballs to advertisers, not about providing content to viewers. If enough people didn't want this kind of programming, it wouldn't be broadcast. What's more, "Housewives" gets even better ratings in red states than it does in blue states? Do you think perhaps it's because in the blue states, we're actually HAVING sex, rather than watching it on TV?

It's one of the great ironies of the right that the very people who want less government in the boardrooms of corporations want the government to decide what they can and can't watch on television.

Steve Gilliard has more on this, in the context of video games.
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