I got a little confused when I first heard that ABC was in hot water with the FCC after Monday Night Football. Something to do with Terrell Owens and a naked lady.
Owens, the Eagles wide receiver, is infamous for his over-the-top end-zone celebrations but I couldn't figure out how he'd pulled this one off. It's one thing to hide a magic marker in your sock, but how did he manage to sneak a naked lady into the end zone of Cowboy Stadium?
Eventually I found out the actual story. T.O.'s naked lady wasn't really naked. She wasn't really a lady, either, just actress Nicollette Sheridan playing her character from ABC's show Desperate Housewives in a pregame promotional skit.
News stations have taken the "controversy" over the skit as license to show it dozens of times since, but if you somehow missed it: Sheridan enters the Eagles locker room and approaches Owens clad only in a towel, hoping to seduce him. Then she drops the towel. The TV audience sees — gasp! — her bare shoulders and Owens' comic take. It was a semi-amusing bit of cross promotion for ABC.
The skit was sexually suggestive, but compared to the Coors Light commercials that punctuate every set of downs on Monday Night Football — or to the low-angle closeups of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders — it was pretty tame stuff.
It was also supposed to be a joke. It may not have been a particularly funny joke, but the fact that it was a joke is, for lack of a better phrase, morally significant.
The hubbub over this skit reminded me of a section from C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters (which I appear to have leant to somebody again, so I can't provide the exact quote). The book is a series of letters from a demon, Screwtape, offering advice to his nephew Wormwood, a junior-level tempter. Wormwood has been trying to lead his client into sin with bawdy jokes, but his uncle advises him not to bother. The client, Screwtape notes, enjoys bawdy humor because he finds these jokes funny — and that's not a response that's useful for Our Father Below.
Dirty jokes, the master tempter says, are only useful with dirty minds — with clients who enjoy such jokes not because they're funny, but because they provide a kind of sexual thrill. With clients like that, these jokes help to nurture the kind of joyless, mirthless, obsession with lust that results from a real captivity to sin. But people like Wormwood's client are just enjoying a good laugh — which is exactly the sort of thing The Enemy (i.e., God) wants for them and therefore ought to be avoided.
The people cluck-clucking about the Monday Night Football sketch as an example of the crassness of TV culture have a point, I suppose. But the skit also serves as a kind of Rorschach test. The response to it separates people into Screwtape's two categories and illustrates, yet again, that many of our friends on the religious right have dirty, dirty minds.
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