I'm not offended by nudity myself, nor even by what Radar on M.A.S.H. memorably called "nakediddity," especially when I find the body in question attractive. I definitely wouldn't kick Janet Jackson out of bed; she's an intelligent, creative, talented, sexy woman. Yet the halftime show had already made me uneasy even before that moment. Nelly's crotch-grabbing performance earlier in the spectacle seemed simply inappropriate to the occasion. (And don't tell me that was unexpected from a man who celebrates "Pimp Juice" and even markets a beverage by that name.) And while the Janet/Justin "costume reveal" was (for me) sexier than Nelly's lame-ass braggadocio, and wouldn't have disturbed me on the Grammys, it bothered me considerably in this context.
We live in a highly sexualized cultural environment. Music, film, TV -- wherever you turn, the subject is sex. As a highly sexed man, I don't object to this. At the same time, I don't necessarily want sex foregrounded in everything I do or wherever I go. Just as I need some time and some places apart from women, I need some breaks from sex.
Professional football definitely includes some sexual undertones: all those muscular male bodies, all those buffed and underdressed cheerleaders. Probably even some homoerotic subtexts -- all that male ass-slapping and physical contact. But I don't turn on the football game to stimulate my thinking about sex, straight or gay; I turn it on to find entertainment in athletic challenge and competition, and to watch mesomorphs -- a body type I'll never know from the inside -- smash into each other at top speed. A bit like stock-car races, with humans in place of automobiles and occasional moments of astonishing, balletic grace. It may get my testosterone up, and it may turn on (some) women to watch these bulls collide, but it's not designed to get me hot and bothered. And I like that just fine. When I feel like getting hot and bothered, I have no shortage of options.
I don't want anything to distract me from that contest when I watch. If I don't want to see Willie Nelson singing with the repellently jingoistic Toby Keith, or Steve Tyler and Aerosmith, in the pregame show, or Beyoncé gargling the national anthem just before the kick-off, I can elect to tune in right as the game starts. I understand the necessity of halftime for the players, and they have to fill that airtime with something. I don't mind reading, fixing a snack, grabbing a beer, or taking a bathroom break for that stretch. I don't need to be "entertained" during it; if the game's good, I'll come back for the second half, and if it's hopelessly lopsided no halftime show -- not even at the Super Bowl -- will keep me from turning it off.
The Super Bowl, in particular, has become a moment intended as a communal family-entertainment gathering around what McLuhan called the "electronic hearth" on a scale unmatched by anything on TV. (Maybe world-cup soccer -- a game I don't watch -- has such a draw, but surely nothing else.) Of course the big game has other implications and subtexts; see Michael R. Real's essay "The Super Bowl: Mythic Spectacle" In Television: The Critical View, edited by Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 170-203). But, like most, I don't chew on those while I watch, though I may do so before or after the gladiatorial spectacle.
More to come . . .
