Mickey Kaus nails the real problem with the Justin-Janet faux controversy: “It’s the feigned sexual assault, stupid!”
The issue isn’t nudity but the implicit endorsement of–searching for the right words here–acting out male fantasies of violent and invasive non-consensual sexual behavior.
(Emphasis Kaus’s.) In many ways this is of a piece with MTV’s other recent manufactured shock moments, the Tatu teen-girl underwear make-out party at the 2003 Movie Awards and the Britney-Madonna-Christina three-way at the 2003 VMAs. Both these phony lesbian displays and Justin’s stripping of Janet’s clothes (invariably and inexplicably referred to by the media as “Janet’s stunt”) involve women tortuously convoluting their sexuality in order to please the male audience. In all cases MTV’s plan was to feed the events into their endless hype autofellatio machine: running the clips on MTV News, showing the clips to guests on TRL, repackaging the clips into the invariable “MTV’s Most Shocking Moments” specials, and so forth, until they become an indelible part of the network’s identity. (Perhaps the most egregious example of this phenomenon is how MTV and VH1 run specials touting the breaking of racial boundaries in the early ’80s by Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video–despite the fact that these very channels erected those very boundaries!)
The good thing about the controversy is that it involves CBS, which probably means Mel Karmazin is going to be directly involved with the in-house response. Hopefully the people at MTV who should have lost their jobs for this calculated, self-indulgent, misogynist horseshit long ago will finally get their comeuppance.