Light On Dark Water

Decline and Fall: Exhibit 14,231

Dating Naked contestant sues VH1 after channel 'failed to blur out her crotch' in nude wrestling match 

Jessie Nizewitz was appearing on VH1 reality programme "Dating Naked" when she stripped off to wrestle her date on a beach. She claims she was promised by producers that her modesty would be "blurred out" when the show aired.

Her modesty?

Miss Nizewitz said she became the subject of ridicule on social media, and the footage had upset her family. She even claims it cost her a relationship, with the man she was dating failing to return her calls after the footage was shown on July 31.

Consider the fact that a show called "Dating Naked" exists, and is available to anyone who has cable TV. Consider the fact that this young woman chose to be on it, and in fact probably had to compete with others for the honor. Consider that the young man she was "dating", who was apparently not the young man with whom she was wrestling naked on television, is thought to have been accepting of the situation but for the presumably few moments when she was fully exposed.

And don't forget that the people responsible for all this are wealthy and influential. The CEO of Viacom, which owns VH1, is "one of the highest-paid people in corporate America", taking home tens of millions of dollars every year.

Update: I meant to include this headline, too, also from the Mirror:

"Watch twerking 'grannies' join Miley Cyrus craze as they are invited to perform on American TV"

 I am not, however, including the link. If you want to watch that, you can find it for yourself.

Maclin Horton

26 responses to “Decline and Fall: Exhibit 14,231”

  1. Art Deco

    What Michael Kelly said 15 years ago. We have achieved the classless society. No one has any class at all.

    Reply
  2. Mac

    Heh. Michael Kelly was a great loss.
    I think I have quoted here before a friend’s observation from many years ago. I said that an argument for the idea (which I had seen somewhere) that there is only so much soul-stuff in the universe might be that people seemed to be becoming less substantial as we became more numerous–less soul-stuff available for the individual. He said “And when there’s nothing left they put you on tv.”

    Reply
  3. Robert Gotcher

    I think it is more like exhibit 14, 231,428,337,249,332.

    Reply
  4. Mac

    🙂 That was just a rough estimate.

    Reply
  5. Rob G

    Cue the historical moral equivalencers: “Well, you know, society isn’t really any worse than it was 100 or 500 or 1000 years ago. In Bumfuggo, Italy in 1743, for instance, pornographic sketches became so numerous that the local council placed a ban on charcoal and paper…” Blah, blah, blah.

    Reply
  6. Mac

    It’s a question I seriously ask myself whenever I think about this topic, which is often. Are things really worse, or not? More important, though, I think is the question of whether this society is getting better or worse, and at least in the realm of sex it seems pretty clear that it’s getting worse.

    Reply
  7. Janet

    http://korrektivpress.com/2014/08/introducing-sex-box-coming-to-a-stereo-v-near-you/#comment-51957
    I don’t really have anything to say, but if I don’t type something, it won’t let me post.

    Reply
  8. Janet

    So now they tell me there are bad pictures on the link they are linking to, so consider yourself warned.
    AMDG

    Reply
  9. Louise

    O dear! There are no words…

    Reply
  10. Louise

    So much stupidity.
    sigh

    Reply
  11. Anne-Marie

    This is the thread where Janet’s cappuccino flavoured chips belong.

    Reply
  12. Mac

    I don’t know why I remember this from a geology class I took 45 years ago. But in talking about the fossil record, the prof said that in the late stages of the development of a species there would come what he called the “frills and furbelows” stage, where the critter got very elaborate–sort of rococo, although he didn’t use that word–in some way or other before disappearing from the record. I sometimes think we’re at that stage.
    Probably one reason it stuck in my mind is that I had never heard the word “furbelow” before. Still don’t know exactly what it means, but I think I got the general idea.

    Reply
  13. Louise

    “This is the thread where Janet’s cappuccino flavoured chips belong.”
    Heh!

    Reply
  14. Anne-Marie

    I always thought a furbelow was a line of fur trim–fur from the word, and trimming by association with frills. So now I look it up, and a furbelow is just a ruffle or pleated flounce. In other words, a frill.
    My father remembers inferring from the expression “jet black” that jet was something black, but he had no idea what. On the other hand, one of my children, having heard of “pitch black,” once described something as “pitch white.”

    Reply
  15. Mac

    So logical, yet so wrong–like many of the things children say. This may not be the same thing, but I’ll tell it because it’s funny: when one of ours was maybe three or so, I took him and his brother fishing. There were a lot of other people there, and of course he was taking it all in. After a while he said very seriously to me, “Actually, Dad, we’re not real fishermens. Actually, real fishermens don’t watch Sesame Street.” He was very into “Actually…” at the time.

    Reply
  16. Louise

    That’s too cute!

    Reply
  17. Anne-Marie

    That kind of wrong logic and false categories is a huge part of how little kids sort out the world for themselves. My kids, whose only contact with a professional woodworker was my sister who does marquetry and custom furniture, were surprised to learn that St Joseph was a carpenter. “I did not know that boys could be carpenters!”

    Reply
  18. Mac

    And if they’d only seen knitting done by a man? “Sexism” is sort of instinctive. I can sometimes almost feel sorry for the feminists and others who think they can just issue a decree and stop the natural human tendency to sort people by sex.

    Reply
  19. Robert Gotcher

    Mac, a typical man kind of thing to say.

    Reply
  20. Mac

    Not at all–I’m merely pointing out the deeply rooted power of gender stereotyping. 🙂
    What’s so interesting about that is that the children drew the line more or less instinctively–they weren’t seeing something that was physically impossible or implausible for a man to do, they just extrapolated from a sample of one. But they did it on the basis of gender, without prompting, rather than, say, age.

    Reply
  21. Robert Gotcher

    I was just kidding.

    Reply
  22. Mac

    Yeah, I thought you were. It is kind of fascinating, though, and Not Acceptable in many circles.

    Reply
  23. Paul

    In 2012 I published an essay about an English Catholic exile writer’s views on femininity. If it would of interest to anyone, do let me know.

    Reply
  24. Mac

    I would be. I’d never heard of Rowlands. England, not to mention the U.S., hath need of a Restitution of Decayed Intelligence now. I see two of seven references in that article are to you–you must be one of the authorities on him.

    Reply
  25. Paul

    I’d be slightly surprised if anyone living knew more about him than me. Anybody working on English political or religious controversy in the late 16th century, or Dutch literature in the early 17th century, should have heard of him, but he isn’t one of the major figures like Donne or Vondel. One of his pieces in the style of Southwell (who was a friend of his) has been much anthologized, though.

    Reply
  26. Janet

    Oh! I have a book about him. 😉
    AMDG

    Reply

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