Breasts From Roots to Nipplegate
There are a lot of old TV movies and miniseries that I’d love to see because I was too young when they originally aired, or because I really enjoyed them back then. Most, if not all, I could find with a simple search on Amazon. But, unfortunately, I really need a version with Korean subtitles for my wife. So whenever I find one here in Korea, I snap it up. A few weeks back, I found Roots.
I know I watched Roots as a kid, but I don’t remember much at all other than the name Kunta Kinte (but that could be because I’ve heard Koreans talk about the character over the years — it was a big hit here when it aired a few years after its original run in the States). Last night, we finally got around to watching the first episode. Two things struck me. The first was that I never realized LeVar Burton (Geordi LaForge in Star Trek: The Next Generation) played the role of Kunta Kinte. The second was the breasts.
Most of the first episode takes place in Africa. In several scenes, women are running around topless. That in itself is not what struck me, but the fact that a TV movie airing in 1977 could show breasts. A bit of googling around shows that this was the first time ABC had intentionally shown breasts on prime-time television. In 1977. And from what I can find, there doesn’t seem to have been a major outcry, despite there having been nearly 30 million viewers of the first episode (according to Wikipedia).
Fast forward 27 years to Super Bowl XXXVIII. Nearly 540,000 complaints were lodged with the FTC when Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed for a half second during the half-time show. What happened in the nearly three decades between Roots and Nipplegate? Were parents really less Puritanical in the 70s? My memory of that decade is somewhat stunted, given that I was born in ’71. I know the Sexual Revolution was still going on, in concert with Women’s Lib. I recall plunging necklines, transparent tops, women going bra-less (nipples everywhere), and the Farrah Fawcett poster. But I really have no point of reference on the general attitudes and mores of the time.
I’m constantly amazed by the ridiculously conservative views toward sex that the current generation of parents espouse. And I’ve long had the impression that we’ve moved somewhat backward in the past couple of decades. But I didn’t realize how far we’d regressed until now.