and going...
Not all sports fans were titillated when a television promo starring Desperate Housewives actress Nicollette Sheridan (who turns 41 on Nov. 21) clad only in a towel aired on Nov. 15 before ABC's Monday Night Football. Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens, 30, the object of her affections in the spot, later apologized for the sexually overt ad, saying, "I think it just really got taken out of context." The Federal Communications Commission is reviewing complaints to determine whether the incident requires further investigation.
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Movies, books, the tube: documenting it
Almost out of Norman Rockwell
A fan page: Christine Applegate
Real life couples shining their light
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Do you remember last year's
scandal when Janet Jackson had her wardrobe malfunction during the Super Bowl? This
year's scandal belongs to Nicolette Sheridan, a star of Desperate Housewives
show whose show teaser was aired in front of Monday Night Football. In it, Nicolette Sheridan seduced Terrell
Owens, wearing nothing but a towel, and eventually wearing nothing but (well,
only her ankles and her back is visible but that's enough to cause a couple of
heart attacks, right?).
What happens exactly is Nicolette Sheridan walks up to Owens in the Eagles locker room wearing a towel and persuades Owens to skip the game and spend time with her. At first Owens is not sure… but he later gives in after Sheridan drops her towel, with her back to the cameras. The teaser ends with Sheridan jumping into Owens' arms. Lots of people were outraged by the show teaser, ignoring the fact that football itself is a medley of violence, misogynistic commercials and half-naked cheerleaders… but football is, ultimately, an event the whole American family can enjoy, right? Breasts and women wrapped in towels, then nude, should be left out of it, the nation does not want to get scandalized. In
his weekly press conference Terrell Owens said: "I felt like it was clean,
the organization thought it was a clean skit and I think it's really gotten
taken out of context with a lot of people." Thanks to ringsurf |
"Interracial" RacismRobert Jensen, following Gail Dines and Andrea Dworkin:Contemporary pornography is not only sexist but also racist, in a distinctive manner. Most people recognize that even with the gains of the civil rights movement of the last half of the 20th centur, racism endures in the United States and that the reproduction of that ideology through the media is a problem. Race still mattes, and the media depictions of race matter. In mainstream movies and television, the most blatant and ugly forms of racism have disappeared, although subtler patterns of stereotyping continue. Pornography is the one media genre in which overt racism is still routine and acceptable. Not subtle, coded racism, but old-fashioned US -- stereotypical representations of the sexually primitive black male stud lover, the animalistic black woman, the hot Latina, the Asian geisha. Ironically, the term that the pornography industry uses for the category of overtly racist material is "interracial," which implies cross-racial understanding and bridge-building, but is something quite different. For example, the director of the Black Attack Gang Bang line of films explains: "My mission is to find the cutest white honeys to get Gang Banged by some hard pipe hitting niggas straight outa Compton." The racism of the industry is so pervasive that it is largely unnoticed. In an interview at the 2005 AEE, with Jon B -- general manager of Doghouse Digital, the company that produced Black Bro's and Asian Ho's -- he saw no racism in a film that depicted black men as sexually primitive stud ravishers and Asian (like white) women as made for sexual servitude. The dominant mode of interracial pornography is black men and white womenWhen I interviewed John E. Depth -- a black man who performs and directs for his own company, In-Depth Productions -- at the 2005 AEE, he said that he didn't really understand why white men like to watch black men having sex with white women in degrading fashion and could only speculate that white men are fascinated with the image of the black man as the "big buck" stud lover (bad boy image? a thug ravisher?) and are hoping for some thrill from the rampant sexual prowess of a real man.Gail Dines concludes that interracial pornography of this sort is a kind of "new minstrel show" that functions as a peepshow for white men into what they see as the authentic black life, not on the plantation [or deep in the jungle] but in the "hood" where all the conventions and inhibitions of white civilized society cease to exist. The "hood" in the white racist imagination is a place of pimps, hos, and gangbangers, generally uncontrolled black bodies, and the white voyeur is invited, for a fee, to slum in this world of debauchery. In the "hood," the white man can dispense with his whiteness by identifying with the black man, and thus become as sexually skilled, sexually manly, and sexually out-of-control as the black man. Here he does not have to worry about being big enough to satisfy the white woman, nor does he have to concern himself with fears about poor performance or "weak wads" or cages like poor hubby in Blacks on Blonds [an interracial film in which the white husband is literally in a cage while watching black men have sex with his wife]. Indeed, the "hood" represents liberation from the cage, and the payoff is a satiated white women (hubby, too?] who has been utterly and completely feminized by being well and truly turned into a "fuckee." |
