The Many Writings of

Of course I was looking away from the giant screen at the most notable moment in the pathetic history of Superbowl halftime shows, and I am not simpleminded enough to own TiVo, since most television material doesn’t bear being shown once, let alone over and over again.

All I got to see was the fuzzed-out, censored version, over and over again as the media Jerry Springer’ed itself into a salacious lather over Janet’s carefully obscured nipple. But the commotion did cause a number of my normally dormant synapses to fire, simulating a thought-like process that I found, well, amusing.

“Aha!” I thought. “We’ve finally found the real WMD’s. Weapons of Mammary Degradation. There they are, right there.” But it couldn’t be just a boob on the tube that galvanized our populace, whipped our legislative and executive bodies, the NFL and the mighty networks into a righteous froth, could it? That doesn’t seem plausible, considering that we actually see more erotically exposed flesh in a single Victoria’s Secret soft porn TV ad than that forlorn pastie-covered nipple so coyly bared by a dastardly wardrobe malfunction. A few more neurons bridged the great void between them somewhere deep in my cortex, causing a limbic reaction that closely simulated ideation.

It can’t be about breasts. Admittedly, we have a strange cultural relationship to them. For one thing, we’ve conveniently forgotten their primary function. Sorry, fellas, but they’re not there for you. They aren’t your trophies nor are they your toys, no matter what you might think. They’re sticking out there to nourish infants. That’s what they’re for. Maybe we have Heff to thank for our worshipful attitude toward the cantilevered flesh offering, the beatification of the conical. I can’t bring myself to blame him completely, though. He merely capitalized on a bizarre pre-existing kink.

In Salvador Dali’s jewel-like painting “The Obscure Object of Desire”, the female form is broken down into an assemblage of detachable parts, the breasts a couple of sacks that, in his words, could be removed and passed around for all to admire. We have gone several spastic leaps past Dali’s vision. I’m still trying to figure out how it happened, the underlying mechanism of it, the origins of aureolophobia, a handy pseudo-scientific term I’ve coined to denote the morbid fear of nipples.

Maybe they remind us of the true function of the breast, which hinders our eternally adolescent vision of women as conveniently fragmented collections of parts, as home entertainment centers. I’m really not sure about this, but there seems to be a fear, an existential terror that strikes the heart of every patriotic American male at the sight of a jiggly female nipple encroaching on the no-woman’s land of a gridiron.

If I was an alien watching the big game on my plasmatron, and I happened not to need to visit my version of the loo during that cheesy lip-synched, crotch-grabbing, flag-draped, pyrotechnic infomercial for insipid lobotomized record industry desperation, I’d probably conclude that the organisms inhabiting this particular land mass were addicted to mildly alcoholic beverages, outlandishly large modes of personal transport, flatulence, that they had great difficulty negotiating coition, and were mortally afraid of nipples.

If the clueless inhabitants of this marvelously fecund land mass held my interest for another few rotations of the orb upon which they subsisted, I would further deduce that they were, for the most part, far more afraid of nipples than guns. I would express this phenomenon with the following equation; guns=good/tits=bad. Through my high-powered imaging devices, I would observe the organisms native to this world discharging projectile weapons of all types and sizes at each other daily, hourly, with great zeal and enthusiasm and occasionally deadly accuracy, while the mere sight of a female nipple would cause the vast majority of them to either foul themselves, commit heinous crimes or convene their most august bodies of oligarchs and issue high proclamations of disgust and dismay.

I would watch crime after egregious crime committed without registering so much as a blip on the radar screen of collective consciousness, an unending pavane of pain and misery committed in the name of one god or another, one cause or another, with those unaffected paying little or no attention to the splatting of blood and lead all around them. But show them an errant nipple, and oh the horror of it. Other less evolved, less civilized societies on this little green and blue ball might not have the same violent mass reaction to the sight of human female nipples, having somehow maintained a connection, however tenuous, to the reality of the function of the majestic glands upon which they reside. This dangerously casual and potentially disastrous attitude would incite the wrath of the mighty theocracy that kept trying to compassionately dictate global mores. We may choose not to protect our children from gun violence, but we can and will keep them safe from accidental nipple sightings. We have priorities to uphold. We maintain the precious right to keep and bear arms, but bare breasts are quite another thing.

I didn’t mean to meander quite so far down that little side road, but I found the vantage point entertaining. Our schizophrenic love/hate relationship to tatas is an odd puzzle; one with a recalcitrant piece that refuses to fit no matter which way it is turned. It must be those damned nipples. We worship the wobbly mounds of flesh upon which they sit, play peek-a-boo and patty cake with them; we even encourage their improbable cosmetic enlargement. We ogle them, rate them, find a zillion ways to dress them up or down, truss, mold, elevate and decorate them. We make momentous life decisions based upon them, their relative heft and girth and sag or lack thereof. But it’s the tips, those purpose-built lactating warheads, which pose the real and lasting threat to our security, our peace of mind. The briefest public exposure of one of those things could herald the end of civilization as we know it, bring all sense of morality to its knees, rend the delicate fabric of our fragile society and fling its tatters into braless hell. Let’s face it, those things are just plain dangerous and need to be regulated, at the federal level if need be. And need there is.

Heck, our own Attorney General was so threatened by the oversized sculptural representation of a nipple that he went to considerable trouble and expense to drape the deadly protuberance, should he by chance have to address the nation with the exposed bust of blind justice looming above him like an incoming zeppelin, making a complete mockery of his moral fiber, rudely trumping his faith with bronze turpitude. I am amazed, awed, and alarmed all at once when I think of the unchecked proliferation of titty bars, those blatant caches of WMD’s, juxtaposed with fierce legal battles seeking to restrain women from discreetly nursing their suckling babes in quasi-public places. We wouldn’t want our men to go getting the wrong idea about the purely utilitarian biological function for which nipples were constructed, would we? That would destroy Bay Watch, the Oscars, and MTV. Those are, after all, WMD program-related activities.

Actually I don’t think that would really happen unless those quintessentially American institutions threw restraint to the winds and just showed what they were forever hinting at. We love the frisson, the almost, the suggestion of erotic possibility. We just can’t handle reality.