Janet Jackson’s Boob and the Rise of Conservativism

The now legendary wardrobe malfunction has had a seemingly disproportionate response among the leadership the way myriad Girls Gone Wild videos have not. The response, however, simply seems to be a symptom—the crowning one, to be sure—of the very slow, very real, return to Puritanism.1

America is seemingly caught up in a near-religious fervor over morality. Politicians’ speeches are peppered with morality of this, immorality of that, all very vocal protests to what seems to be the decaying moral fiber of the nation. I can’t argue that the social structure seems to be collapsing, falling into ever more hedonistic pursuits, but I will dispute the repeated implicit assertion that we can arrest this degeneration through legislation.2

Michael Powell, head of the F.C.C., has vowed to seek new legislation that will severely penalize indecency on television, and, in something even more suggestive, he’s argued that he should extend those same or similar rules to cable television.3

This is something far out of proportion to a solar-capped nipple flash. This is the beginning of a new wave of censorship that will eventually threaten more than just television. Once the legislation is in place for broadcast media, what’s to stop legislators from defining what is indecent for print? or film? or thought?

A treaty the Bush administration has sent to the Senate for ratification promises just that: in the name of “war on terror,” the treaty seeks to employ Carnivore, an FBI computer program that will actively monitor any terrorist activity on the Internet, as well as radically restructuring the rules that govern how evidence is gathered and used against individuals. The treaty is not simply a dangerous impedance to free thought, but it also suggests the government doesn’t trust its own citizenry. Is this the action of a democratic society?

Conservatives, it has become increasingly clear, are unwilling to live in a world that contains ideas or lifestyles that don’t exist within their narrow framework of morality. If people cannot live the moral lives conservatives would have them live, then legislation must be passed to force conformity to that worldview.

Yet the underlying notions of freedom that are supposed to guide American government are being lost in this return to morality. As Oliver Wendell Holmes stated (perhaps apocryphally), “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”4

Janet Jackson’s boob notwithstanding, it is a dangerous and slippery slope the conservatives would send us down. A breast is not the downfall of modern civilization (inappropriateness aside), nor will Showtime’s Queer as Folk or The L Word cause us to descend into immorality.

We cannot legislate morality (witness the brilliant success of the eighteen amendment), nor can we enforce a worldview—unless we wish to construct a new nation, under Christianity, where morals are handed down from a religious, and infinitely conservative, government.

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