From a recent Tom Bubbles Digby newsletter...god only knows why i subscribe

In recent news, President Bush signed a new law increasing fines for TV
stations showing things like that "wardrobe malfunction" that gave us a
glimpse of a bare female breast during the Super Bowl broadcast a year or
two back. I'm wondering what the lawmakers were thinking.

I've been to my share of hot-tub parties and nude beaches, and I've had
fun in bed with people of various and sundry genders, so I've seen
breasts (as well as other body parts). I've even touched a few. They
didn't seem all that dangerous.

Neither did the breasts I've seen in movies. I'm pretty sure I could
look at them all day with no ill effects other than eventual boredom. If
I were more heterosexual it might take longer for the boredom to set in,
but I don't think the effects would be qualitatively different.

But what of breasts on a TV screen? Are they somehow more dangerous?

They don't seem to be, but then the breast images I've seen on TV came in
via videotape or DVD or cable. Might breast images via broadcast TV be
different?

Is it possible that when a broadcast TV signal contains an image of bare
female breasts it can cause TV sets to emit mind-control rays that will
turn any red-blooded male in the vicinity into a mindless breast-seeking
zombie? Did we come close to having millions of men shuffling up and
down streets all across America, arms out in front like cartoon
sleepwalkers, muttering "Must ... find ... breasts ... Must ... worship
... breasts ... Must ... obey ... breasts ..."? Were we spared that fate
only because the nipple on the breast involved in that wardrobe
malfunction was pierced, and the metal in the jewelry shorted out the
electric fields of the zombie rays? Did that one tiny bit of metal save
America?

>From what I as an engineer know about the technical side of TV, I'd say
the answer is No.

So why all the fuss? Part of it comes from our ancestors' religious
taboos. But that's only part. The rest is because we have a whole
culture built around selling stuff to people with more money than brains,
and much of that relies on the fact that many people also have more
hormones than brains.

The media are playing a big game of brinksmanship, to see how close they
can come to showing forbidden body parts without actually letting us see
them. They're like the mechanical rabbit greyhounds chase at the race
track (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhound_racing). We're trained
to run after them as hard as we can, scattering money as we go, but are
never allowed to catch them.

That's why the gov't is stomping on the people responsible for that
"wardrobe malfunction". They let the greyhounds catch the mechanical
rabbit. If that happens too many times the dogs will start to realize
that that scrap of fur with motors and such inside isn't really worth
running themselves to death for, and the game will be over.

Thus the real evil is not the sight of bare breasts on TV screens. The
real evil is the merchandising colossus that trains people to use up the
planet in pursuit of those breasts while sort of glossing over the fact
that the breasts people are chasing have a real person attached to them.