Why Janet Jackson's errant nipple is the perfect excuse for draconian censorship in a confused nation

By Ian Bell

The president was asleep, as usual. It appears that if a crisis is likely on George Bush's watch, the Secret Service have instructions to ensure that the commander-in-chief is tucked up in bed. Some might find it odd that a grown man would be slumbering at 8.30pm, particularly if he is a football fan and the Super Bowl is on, but that's George's story. When Janet Jackson's right breast burst upon the nation's TV screens at half-time last weekend he was dreaming, possibly of a massive failure of intelligence. Possibly his own.

If so - always a necessary caveat with Bush - he was perhaps the only man in America to fail to see what has since become the most frequently requested image in the history of the internet. Performing Rock Your Body with the peculiarly popular Justin Timberlake, Ms Jackson celebrated the song's climax with what is known, if you believe CBS and MTV, as "a wardrobe malfunction". One minute she was adequately leather-clad; the next, a lone nipple, conveniently decorated with a sun-shaped gold trinket, had plunged America into shock. Nobody, it seems, had ever seen one of those before.

"This country takes exposed breasts very, very seriously," said Robert Thompson, director of the Centre for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, apparently unaware that "this country" is home to the biggest porn industry on the planet. According to the New York Times, meanwhile, CBS is to become the subject of a Federal Communications Commission investigation because of the incident. In poor old Britain the best we could manage was John Lydon fulfilling his contract by swearing a bit at 10 million viewers and upsetting only a few dozen of them.

Jackson and Timberlake have since been forced to make profuse apologies for their outrageous behaviour. The latter has said that even his own family were "completely offended" by the incident; the former has been dropped, unceremoniously, as a presenter from the Grammy Awards show lest her torso further inflames opinion. But hell, it seems, has yet to cease breaking loose.

First came the suggestion that there could be a delay of "up to five minutes" in the transmission of the supposedly live Grammy broadcast in order to allow CBS producers to intercept any words or images that might possibly offend. Then there was word that ABC had requested a more modest five-second delay in its Oscars telecast. "The network has made it clear they're feeling enormous pressure to institute a delay," said Bruce Davis, executive director of the Motion Picture Academy. But if you think that's funny, there's more.

Just as Davis was noticing the thin end of a wedge and expressing concern about "a network representative deciding that remarks like Michael Moore's last year" - a full-blooded attack on Bush and his war - might be "inappropriate", NBC was springing into action. It announced that a 1.5 second shot of a bare-breasted woman in the background of a scene in the medical drama ER was "too difficult for many of our affiliates to air". A question of taste? The woman in question is 80 years old and supposed to be having a heart attack. As one of the show's producers rather sensibly put it: "To think there is anything salacious there is absurd." The cut was made, nevertheless.

What, you may wonder, is going on? Has it really become so easy to outrage public decency in America? Is the land of the free having one of its periodic fits of puritanism? Lydon's behaviour on I'm A Celebrity ? Get Me Out Of Here! was utterly predictable - predicted by me, at any rate - and rather less sensational than he probably hoped. Yet judging by the reaction to Jackson's brief moment of partial nudity, little Johnny would have been lynched if he had used his expletives on the American airwaves. Conservatism runs deep, it appears, on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

Yet how can that be the case? Americans are known, certainly, as a God-bothering lot, with a society that is more formally religious than any other in the West. They have a long tradition of censorship, self-censorship and witch-hunts, despite the First Amendment. They idealise public morality, contrary to all the evidence provided by everything from Enron to Iraq. They regard network television as "family entertainment", an attempt to please all the people all of the time, despite the fragmentation of the traditional nuclear family. And they have a habit of resorting to paranoia in troubled times, as everything from McCarthyism to the religious right to the Department of Homeland Security tends to prove. But even by those standards the furore over Jackson's errant nipple is peculiar.

There is, after all, the matter of porn. By some accounts, that industry now surpasses Hollywood itself in terms of its income. You want it; they got it, protected by the constitution and "used", all the evidence suggests, by tens of millions of Americans. Could such people possibly have been offended by anything other than Timberlake's singing?

Religion, equally, is a disputable case. Many Americans still go to church, it is true, but a majority do not. Vast numbers claim to have been "born again" (if at first you don't succeed ?) but equally improbable numbers claim to have been abducted by aliens or convinced that Saddam Hussein attacked the Twin Towers. The Christian right remains a force in the land, but as Bush long ago realised, they are not sufficiently potent to win elections or unpick the abortion laws. On that issue, plainly put, the sensible majority of ordinary citizens simply weren't having it.

So what remains? Advertisers form the obvious answer. They are, and always will be, innately conservative. I doubt if many among them would have cared if Jackson had pole-danced on the goal posts at the Super Bowl had the public demanded it. But the idea of a single lost sale turns TV's sponsors into hellfire preachers. Who wants their product associated with "indecency"? And who puts the squeeze on advertisers? Groups like the Traditional Values Coalition and Concerned Women For America: small minds from small towns, representing nobody but themselves.

This stuff comes around with wearying regularity, of course, but it never seems to go away entirely. Not so many years ago we had Tipper Gore, idiot wife to Al, campaigning against the lyrics of pop songs. Rock music got blamed, through some weird thought process, for Columbine. Joe Lieberman, the loser Democrat, has a regular stump speech in which he inveighs against the entertainment industry and its effect on "values". Yet what did Jackson do save allude briefly to one of the facts of life? If you trusted the reactions of the networks and much of the American press you might believe that an entire nation has become infantilised.

That's not the case, mercifully, but it does point to one of the ways in which America is misunderstood and misunderstands itself. Just as it is split down the middle politically, the original 50-50 nation, so it is divided over morals and personal liberty. The constitution is all that holds together a country incapable of reaching a consensus on abortion, prayers in school, or gun control. The sickly inverted prurience that recoils from the sight of a woman's breast is matched by those who see the founding principles of the republic, personal freedom first and foremost, being eroded steadily. Censorship has re-entered the bloodstream of the American body politic and the craven response of the networks to the Super Bowl controversy must be deeply satisfying to those who like it that way.

What are the chances, do you think, of Sean Penn being allowed to deliver much of a speech if he happens to win an Oscar? The actor is, if anything, more deeply opposed to Bush's war than Moore. He could probably be relied upon for an eloquent comment in normal circumstances. Now a few bare inches of Ms Jackson's skin have given ABC the perfect excuse to ensure that no uppity actor can say anything "difficult".

The American media are already mired in self-censorship. Now, it seems, any daft little incident can be seized on to chip away a few more of America's liberties. Whoever has been engaging in shameful behaviour recently, it wasn't a pop singer looking for publicity. Welcome to the 1950s.

08 February 2004