Today’s topic is a tad delicate, so let’s back into it gently.
Last Sunday I found the Emmy Awards in progress in the living room, and sat down to take a look. I was mildly pleased to find them moving along more briskly than in days of yore, and mildly amused at the Bob Newhart subplot (for most of you who were not watching, he was supposedly imprisoned in a Plexiglas cube with only three hours’ worth of air to encourage winners to keep their acceptance speeches short). I found the Dick Clark retrospective mildly touching, and the Aaron Spelling tribute mildly mawkish. But all the while, a distraction was beginning to build, like the buzzing fly that you track with your eyes while zoning in and out of a less than compelling conversation.
The thing is, there were a lot of daring (and even double-daring) necklines being worn by the women moving on and off stage to announce the awards. There were plunging necklines and low-lying necklines and panic-stricken necklines that seemed to be clinging to their owners like grim death.
They weren’t exactly shocking — how could they be, when we’ve all been exposed to much more? And, though I suppose they were arousing the male half of the audience, they naturally weren’t doing anything to me. But they were distracting, drawing my eyes away from the owner’s words and appearance. Instead of responding to this or that starlet’s engaging personality, perky smile, or lame delivery of even lamer jokes, I was compiling a private breast classification system, rating gown décolletage and brooding over who should have worn what or who should have opted for an artfully arranged gossamer scarf or two.
So it occurred to me to wonder how this or that starlet, whether aging like Kate Jackson or dewy-eyed like those young girls whose names I don’t know, would react to my reaction — to being, essentially, reduced to a set of more or less attractive mammary glands. These women were, for the most part, pretty, enthusiastic, elaborately made up, carefully rehearsed, and very hard to focus on or take seriously. There was an Emperor’s New Clothes quality to their performance — that quality of ignoring the obvious rerouting of attention provoked by partially bared breasts.
I have teenaged girls, but even many mothers of elementary school children cringe at what their daughters pick up from the culture about being “hot.” Stroll through the infant and toddler departments in clothing stores as warm weather approaches and check out some of the clothes being marketed for girls in the toddler sizes. You’ll not only find miniskirts that offer a great view of sagging diapers but also see two-piece swim suits where the top is a narrow elastic strip designed, I suppose, to get little girls (and those around them) used to the idea of their strategically baring nearly all, even at an age when there’s nothing significant to bare. There are people who find these offerings cute. Some of them are probably listed in your local sex offender directory.
When you get into this kind of conversation it is very hard not to come off as a prude — a label people largely use nowadays to kill the messenger before the message interferes with life as we know it. In reality, it’s hard to imagine where a real prude would seek sanctuary from the daily onslaught of explicit visuals. But the real damage being inflicted on both girls and boys by society’s bizarrely abnormal attitude toward sex is so great that you wonder how people can realistically dismiss the occasional clear-eyed messenger.
In the end, my small illumination last Sunday evening conveyed a less emotionally charged message than the one I already knew. There were these women on the screen talking to me, trying to tell me things, and I wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t taking them seriously. I wasn’t even being enthralled by beauty; I was being sidetracked by selected body parts.
Don’t these women want to be treated like real human beings? Don’t they want to be respected? Don’t they want to be paid attention to, to be recognized as persons?
And don’t the rest of us want that too?
Madame X works in Washington DC for the federal government. Because of her employer, she must write under a pseudonym.
