Jon Carroll
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
On PBS recently there was a four-hour documentary called "China From the Inside." It was a little ponderous and didactic, but it was also in many ways a revelation. One part of the documentary addressed the problem of pollution in China, specifically toxins in the rivers. The combination of human waste and industrial effluent has made a third of the rivers useless for drinking, bathing, fishing and irrigation.
One of the primary effects of river pollution is cancer. The documentary showed some cancer victims. One of them was an old woman in the final stages of esophageal cancer. She was skeletal; her skin had shrunk away from her ribs, leaving her looking like an anatomical drawing. She was suffering, hardly conscious; the narrator said the woman died a few days after the segment was shot.
But here's the thing: The woman's breasts had been digitally blurred. Because she was so thin, she didn't really have breasts, but she had nipples, and those were apparently arousing enough to cause the PBS censor to step in. See, it's not prurience that's bad; it's not sexual exploitation that's bad; it's breasts that are bad. Any breasts, even the breasts of an elderly Chinese woman dying of cancer. Your breasts are bad. Speak to them severely.
I don't think that the government had to order this documentary altered. The FCC probably didn't know anything about it before it aired. No, PBS is so terrified that it didn't need a cautionary letter; it went ahead and did it anyway, just in case someone's mother somewhere writes the FCC saying, "My son saw the breasts of a terminally ill Chinese woman, and now he's playing in a heavy-metal band."
It's this whole Janet Jackson thing. She showed her breast -- not even her whole breast; a pastie was involved -- on national television, and the world exploded. Part of the argument was, she did it at the Super Bowl! The wholesome American God-fearing Super Bowl, where brain damage is just part of the fun! And ever since then, over-the-airwaves breasts have become verboten, no matter what the context.
The FCC doesn't do context. It has a fundamentalist Christian view of nudity, that it's always bad because it's always erotic. Leaving aside the loathsome equation erotic = bad, the reasoning is adolescent. Adults are able to hold several views of the body simultaneously. Certainly naked bodies can be used to attract sexual partners, but bodies spend a lot more of their time as machines, processing air and water and food, breaking it down into necessary chemicals, excreting the rest. Eventually the machine breaks beyond repair.
Doctors and nurses deal with this reality every day, and they are able to make the distinction. They have normal sex lives, or at least as normal as the rest of us.
Our culture fetishizes breasts; other cultures choose other parts of the body for erotic attention. The particular irony here is that breasts are also a common locus for cancer. Extreme modesty about them can actually be dangerous, even as extreme modesty about sexual intercourse is a hindrance in the fight against AIDS. But all that is context and, as I said, the FCC doesn't do context.
more:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/23/DDGRJN7H8S1.DTL
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