The Superbowl came and went yesterday without Sir Paul’s disrobing. But Frank Rich, the New York Times’ one-man Cultural Divide, was still in a state of dudgeon yesterday (“The Year of Living Indecently”) about the public’s (to Rich) inexplicable reaction to last year’s obscenity.
Mickey Kaus tries to explain to Rich and other members of the press why you didn’t have to be a televangelist to find the sight of Janet Jackson’s breast inappropriate for prime time:
“I watched the game with a group of non-evangelical, non-moralistic dads who were uniformly horrified. The problem for them wasn’t sex–their kids see flesh all the time in videos–but a form of sexism, not prudery but piggishness. Surely there are some types of behavior–homophobia, perhaps, or racism, or Republicanism–that even Frank Rich wouldn’t want implicitly endorsed during a telecast watched by most of the country’s teens and pre-teens. Yet the press has effectively recast this complicated issue as an uncomplicated case of ’Nipple-gate,’ of blue-noses overreacting to the sight of a breast. No wonder red staters respond negatively when New Yorkers call them simplistic.”