Come On, J.Lo

Time to come out of the woodwork…

J.Lo – you’re beautiful, you can dance, you can sing, and you’re famous enough to do it all for the Super Bowl halftime show.

But I don’t really get it. It’s all still a bunch of sex-sensationalizing Madonna mimicry, just 30 years later. These days, it’s not new like it was when she did it and shocked the world. Unfortunately, it’s commonplace now.

And the copycat crotch-grabbing was downright dorky. It wasn’t cool-looking when Michael Jackson did it. Different; not cool. It’s not cool-looking when rappers and athletes do it. It just looks…well…dumb.

J.Lo, you’re standing up for girls and specifically Latinas (as your singing said), showing them how to dance in front of the world almost naked at the height of your career. You were singing with most of your clothes off next to your daughter singing in pure white, with her clothes on. The symbolic juxtaposition was really odd. The message implied that the innocent girl looked up aspiringly to the worldly, “wise” woman with almost no clothing on. Weird. Not to mention watching it all with our 9-year-old and 14-year-old sons, who look at a woman as a human being rather than something to be undressed. I didn’t realize we’d be spending the evening explaining to them what prostitution, strippers, and pole-dancing are, but there we were.

You mean the celebrities in our culture can’t get creative enough to do their own thing, and not feel the need to also get near-naked in the process?

Don’t get me wrong, Jennifer. I’m not new to modern dance. I’ve always appreciated the human body and its capabilities. One of my favorite shows as a kid was Solid Gold. I loved it. In my teens, I grew up on MTV and Madonna. I marveled at her ability to train her body so intensely that she could sing flawlessly through a concert while her cardiovascular system was being rigorously taxed. How do you sing like that when you need to breathe heavily instead? Her sex stuff wasn’t my thing, but I appreciated her work ethic. In college, I attended as many dance performances at UCSB’s Campbell Hall as I could afford, thanks to reduced-rate student passes. Ever since living on Orcas Island, I’ve been to almost every dance and talent show, and I’d be at Zumba class every week if the time didn’t conflict with when I’m getting my kids ready for school. In the evening if I want to have a little down time, I often go to the best performances of America’s Got Talent or Britain’s Got Talent on YouTube. Whether it’s gymnasts, contortionists, acrobats, or dancers, I’m in. I love dance and I especially love watching other people dance.

I’ve seen a lot of uncovered bodies, but here’s the thing – the dance performances they’re in aren’t usually bent on flaunting shallow sexuality as the primary message.

Don’t mistake me here either, J.Lo. I love intimacy, passion, and skin on skin. But there’s so much more depth to it when you’re in a committed relationship than the raw, instantly-gratifying, self-serving act you’re portraying.

And what is the deal with glamorizing the prostitute look and the stripper pole? I didn’t think it was sexy. I thought it was totally cheesy. More importantly, you’re teaching children and men that the whole objectification thing isn’t going away – that in fact, it’s actually acceptable – condoned by women with an influence as powerful as yours. Haven’t we been trying to get past those things?

Maybe this is how you always are and I just never knew it because I don’t have cable TV or watch enough YouTube. I don’t know that piece of it.

The other disturbing aspect is that highly influential people like you who work hard to attain the level of athleticism, endurance, and beauty that you have (which costs you tens of thousands of dollars in the process) tend to forget or overlook the fact that millions of young girls in our global culture measure themselves against women like you and come out feeling inferior. Teenagers are scathingly critical of themselves with the media influences that are all around them. I was very critical of myself when I was young, and I watch and listen to girls now. I hear all the girls’ same self-critiques that I heard (and did) when I was their age. Magazines, TV shows, movies, and music performances tell kids what kind of body they should have and how they should look, and they try to align with those things. But most of us don’t have the time, money, or genetics to look like you. There is plenty about you to be impressed with, J.Lo, but between symbolizing beauty and flaunting sexuality, you’re misguiding the girls and boys of the world.

Boys and girls don’t realize they’ve lost their innocence until they’re older and can’t reclaim it. Once it’s done, it’s done. There were a lot of media influences in my life that I wasn’t protected from – you name it, I had seen it – and I get fiercely protective for other kids’ sakes. If kids could articulate it, what if they could tell you that they’d like to stay innocent for as long as possible? I didn’t need to find a stack of Penthouse magazines at 8 years old and look through them all. It didn’t enhance my 9-year-old childhood to happen upon porn cable stations one night when I couldn’t fall asleep. I still can’t believe we all sat around as a family and watched The Exorcist when I was 10 – I couldn’t go anywhere by myself for the next year without feeling scared. I still don’t like when I happen upon something that’s sickening that I don’t need to know, unless there’s some way I can help someone else avoid it.

Perhaps people don’t see purity defiled when it’s all wrapped up in expensive silver sparkles. When everyone surrounding an event supports it – TV stations, football leagues, advertisers, beautiful celebrities, commentators, Hollywood, etc. – is that how we “commoners” gauge its appropriateness?

Dang. Our culture rails for politically-correct everything, and yet okays the most misguided examples for the next generation. Your phenomenal platform for showing off multicultural diversity was cheapened with an orgy-like vibe. Any woman in a real-life role of guiding children, whether as a dance instructor, a soccer coach, or a music teacher, would be expelled from her position if she turned around, bent over, and flaunted sexually-suggestive gluteal gyrations. Yet you do it in front of hundreds of millions of people on their big screen TVs because it’s considered okay as family entertainment. In the name of girl power. Feminism that glorifies women as sex objects and androgenizes men doesn’t seem like feminism to me.

The whole performance would be perfect for analysis of its symbolism in a Cultural Anthropology college course – it’s the kind of thing I routinely wrote 20-page papers for in studies to get my degree. You can decipher a lot about a person’s belief system from all of the details of a production like that without even needing to know anything beforehand about their social, political, or emotional background. Perhaps you don’t even realize some of the subliminal or even blatant statements you made in the show, as intentional as you may have felt every detail was. (I don’t plan to do a study of every detail, but I’m sure someone will.) You and other celebrities must not realize what you’re doing to help the pornography and trafficking industries flourish by touting shallow flesh. This sex promotion stuff isn’t just “fun.” It’s gnarly.

On a separate but related topic, a huge event like the Super Bowl is already a major hub for people involved in the sex industry. Read this eye-opening article from the Miami Herald about “Why a Miami Super Bowl is a magnet for sex-trafficking.” And there are other notorious places in the world where our own citizens go to secretly seek out sex. Read about Svay Pak, Cambodia, on Wikipedia and you will be sickened. Then read about people who rescue children from places like these.

Sorry to get heavy on you, J.Lo, but I know someone who was trafficked in the sex trade and there’s nothing cute about it. It all starts with a shallow fascination with flesh, as innocently as it may seem to begin. So I just can’t sit by and watch people idolize something masked in prettiness that’s actually really messed up on many levels. I have to speak up.

I appreciate the people out there who entertain us with their sheer ability, their humor, their creativity, and their candor. When you’re really good at something, near-nudity and pole-dancing need not enter the equation. Neither should guys in masking-tape harnesses. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for how they were made to dress.

Jim Gaffigan and James Corden, I better not see you out in thongs next Super Bowl halftime.

Shakira, I loved most of your performance. I didn’t care for the camera angles right in your crotch. Anytime you were a part of it, the primary focus seemed to be more on dance rather than sex. I’m all for the multicultural aspects, just not the cheapening of them here and there during other parts of the show.

Photo by Jose Carlos Fajardo