I mean, c'mon, it was a joke, making fun of the guys who get all giddy over seeing an actress topless in a movie, not of the female actors themselves. Maybe you might recognize this craze from such comedy hits as KNOCKED UP in which Seth Rogen and his friends are building a site that tells people in what movie actresses' breasts are shown. But whatever, some people are stodgy and ever since the whole PC craze took over it seems like every and any body wants to find some way in which they were insulted so as to call attention to their specific demographic cause (gender, religion, creed, race, so on...).
But since people still haven't let it go, I gotta say something. Yesterday Geena Davis issued a declaration that somehow this bit will make young girls unable to aspire to greatness and Jamie Lee Curtis compared it to a public execution and kinda implied she showed her boobs in early movies because men made her do it. Incidentally, Jamie Lee Curtis was born hermaphroditic so one must wonder that, since technically she was born male and female, were they really boobs?
But that's the thing that seemed to go over all the heads of the complainers. First off, there's the general "What's the big deal about Women's breasts?" That is, they're just like men's breasts with a bit more fatty tissue and milk ducts. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the fact that women's breasts are considered "private parts" while men's are not is itself a form of sexism and perhaps state legislators should reconsider decency laws that prohibit women to show their breasts publicly. Perhaps if this were more commonplace, people wouldn't place so much taboo-based importance on analogous organs.
A second part, addressing the note that, as Curtis implied, these breast-showings were forced on her by male producers, perhaps this helps in bringing to light the fact that perhaps the good ol' boy system is still alive and well and needs to be confronted (it's said that Marilyn Monroe had to spend quite a bit of time on the "casting couch" which added to the fragility of her psyche).
Jane Fonda asked how come there was no song listing penises we've seen? I can answer that in two ways: 1, because everybody will admit that breasts are beautiful, an amalgam of child-sustaining nectar provider (the mother teat and whatnot) and divine-sculpted forbidden fruit while the penis is a weird-looking chicken-neck thing that nobody really wants to see and 2, showing penis, while new, IS rapidly being considered a way to film acclaim much like baring breasts may have been in the old day. Fassbender never woulda gotten any attention for the vapid, slow SHAME had he not shown a lot of well-endowed dong (he even grew fans who were considered "Fassinated") and Jason Segel all but cemented himself as a comedy giant when he did full frontal in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL. Yet had they done a "We Saw Your Penis" song, you wouldn't have anybody complaining - except maybe some parental decency groups (AKA "Bored Conservatives") and possibly women's rights groups offended by the tirade about penises.
Then there's the people claiming calling them "boobs" is a derogatory term for breasts. From what I've learned from various girlfriends, female friends, and even movies "boobs" is considered one of the most harmless terms ascribed to the female breast. A few years back I bought a shirt for my mom, a 2-time Breast Cancer survivor, that said "I (Heart) Boobies". The Keep a Breast Foundation sees this term as a way of allowing younger girls to get educated on the value and health of their breasts.
Was the song a bit silly? Sure. But as Jack Nicholson said in an old interview "the reality of the censorship is if you suck a tit, you're an X, but it you cut it off with a sword, you're a PG". It's drawing attention to not only nudity in film but also to the sort of double standard ascribed to women's breasts as well as the fact that as a culture we worship violence but demonize sexuality. And it addressed it in a funny way and the fact that so many supposedly intelligent people, especially in an industry that daily walks the line between edgy expression and smut (and I mean smut as far as violence and addiction as much as pornographic sexuality) got offended is much sillier than any vaudeville song and dance.
Watch it yourself if you didn't watch the Oscars (and BTW, the Charlize look of disgust was choreographed, she was in on the joke from the beginning and took no offense because she's a classy, smart, artistic and strong woman):
If people are offended by the idea that Hollywood has sunk to the level of boob jokes, where have you been the last 20 years? If they're offended by what this projects to the world about the "oh so serious" Academy Awards, I say I was offended by the freakish amount of plastic surgery Billy Crystal showed at last years Oscars. If they say it was demoralizing to women, I simply say never did he insult women, never did he say those actresses were any less for having shown their arbitrary body parts, and never did he say that women are pieces of meat attached to breasts. He just brought up something that many people at home think when they see a topless scene in a movie - "wow, that's bold/exciting/dirty/offensive" - that is, he tapped into what those scenes were meant to do, to excite, arouse, and offend. He tapped into what movies, good movies, do, make us react and bring out some level of titillation (no pun intended)(okay, pun intended).
Everybody, stop taking yourselves so seriously. Woman get acid thrown in their faces in the Middle East and for a while daughters were killed in China due to their baby quotas. American Politicians claim that women can close their wombs during rape and one of the running dialogues during the recent elections was the Republican Party's war on women. A comedian who does a schtick pulled almost directly from an episode of his hit TV series (I felt like Peter Griffin was hosting the Oscars for a beat, which would be amazing) is not an attack on women. It's a joke that appeals to the more, er, "low-brow" cinephiles who are just as important (if not more when you consider box office numbers) than the highbrow critics and auteurs and whatnot who perceive the Oscars as the greatest and most hallowed honor to bestow upon a human being, Nobel Prize be damned. Hopefully next year he hosts again and does a "I Saw Your Dong" song and dance. I guarantee you won't see Jamie Lee Curtis' husband Christopher Guest issuing a complaint about it. Unless his wife puts him up to it.
If you have a disagreement with this, please comment it. I would like to start a dialogue as to what, exactly, was offensive. All I saw was a man pointing out a simple truth: We saw your boobs.
- Ryan
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