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See Janet, See Janet's...
By Mark Harrison
Cornell Daily Sun (Cornell U.)
(U-WIRE) ITHACA, N.Y. - "I think I just
saw a boob." A single and solitary thought that engulfed
a nation at the end of the Super Bowl halftime show. Justin
Timberlake--my former arch-nemesis and newfound personal hero--ripped
off a section of Janet Jackson's costume and simultaneously
jump-started the "birds and bees" discussion of an
entire generation.
CBS cut away from the shot of Janet's exposed
breast without hesitation, but the curtailed image served as
a sort of exclamatory question mark before the second half.
"Did we really just see Janet's boob?" wondered Super
Bowl viewers across the country. Over the next minute and a
half, nearly $7 million in advertising were flushed down the
drain as a distracted nation grappled with a massive dose of
cognitive dissonance.
In terms of sheer volume alone, the abrupt
cut from Super Bowl halftime was much more than just mismanaged
television. At perhaps no other point in the history of human
civilization have so many people had the same thought running
through their heads at the exact same moment. Could this be
the next jump in the evolution of the human mind?
Probably not, but the unmasking of Ms. Jackson's
boob--to use a clinical term--may have been a clever ploy by
CBS to compete with PayPerView's halftime programming, the Lingerie
Bowl. Think about all those poor suckers who dished out the
bucks to get a glimpse of some skin while the rest of the nation
patronized the nudey bar for free.
Of course, CBS was quick to issue a release
claiming that Timberlake's coup of Janet's bosom was, in fact,
not sanctioned by the network. That's right, for the record,
this was a non-sanctioned boob-coup.
CBS even went so far as to exhort a statement
from Mr. Timberlake regarding the nipple in question: "I
am sorry that anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction
during the halftime performance of the Super Bowl." Wardrobe
malfunction!?! Are you kidding me? That's a pretty coincidental
malfunction considering it directly followed the lyric "I'm
gonna have you naked by the end of this song."
Purposeful or not, the stunt achieved two concrete ends. It
so distracted viewers that few noticed the complete lack of
offense that marked the beginning of the second half. More important,
though, the unsheathed breast managed to make most of us forget
how remarkably bad the rest of the halftime show was. And rest
assured, disgruntled Lingerie Bowlers, it was like watching
the last five years of pop music Nair itself in the nether regions.
Even now this breast-out-of-context has me
perplexed. I just can't get away from it: How could one bare
body part throw the most powerful nation on the globe completely
off balance? We saw boob and weren't sure if we were supposed
to laugh, cry, or applaud; the paradox of it all had left us
paralyzed. A well-placed subliminal advertisement at the exact
moment of boob-baring might very well have sparked a panicked
sprint for SPAM in the grocery aisles the next morning.
I'll tell you, though, it really does make
me wonder if we could apply this kind of shock value to some
more useful end. Certainly this "What the hell just happened?"
phenomenon could be harnessed and exploited for perverse gain.
Of course we'd have to be taking advantage of a culture that
is as obsessed with celebrity fanfare as we are. How about the
British? They seem superficial enough. Having the Beckhams disrobe
each other on the footsteps of Buckingham Palace would be as
good a distraction as a nationwide power outage. The crown jewels,
Tower Bridge: We could hop right in and lift anything we wanted.
Trust me, they wouldn't take it personally.
But it's still a little bit disturbing that
one breast had the ability to create more suspense than the
game-winning field goal of the actual game. What political debate
or election coverage has featured one moment that spurred anxiety
and indecision so widespread as this?
No, I think that if we didn't know it before,
it's been proven with incontrovertible veracity now: There is
something wrong with us, something very wrong. Do we not know
what breasts are supposed to look like? Was there something
horribly irregular or deformed about the exposed Ms. Jackson?
On both accounts, the answer is a resounding no. And yet, confronted
with an unexpected boob in an unexpected place at an unexpected
time, this great nation, each and every one of us, balked like
sixth graders at a school dance.
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