Case in point: Wednesday night, on Barbara Walter's 10 Most Fascinating People of 2009, she interviewed Lambert regarding his now notorious AMA performance. Again, ABC refused to air footage of the simulated oral sex or the male on male kissing. No surprise there. What I did find surprising, however, was no more than 15 minutes earlier, during an interview with Lady Gaga, the network aired a segment of one of her music videos showing her kissing another female. So if same sex kissing is so offensive to ABC, why would they show Gaga doing it, and not Lambert. ABC claims that the reason why they did not show Lambert's kiss was in the interest of time and that "It was an editorial decision to show very little from the performance and focus on the fresh, new interview with Adam Lambert." That's strange. Didn't he get the interview because of the kiss? They also said the reason they showed the Gaga kiss was to show examples of things that have upset her father to provide "context" for the interview.
In 2004, on live television, Pink performed 'God is a DJ' on the Billboard Awards. Take a look. Pay close attention at around the 30 second mark and at 1:35:
Let's see:
She flipped off the camera. Check. Pushed a guy's face into her crotch. Check. Banned from the network? No. Public Outcry? No. How come? Was it because she's female? Or because her partner wasn't? Or maybe both? To me, there wasn't any difference in what she did to what Adam Lambert did. I still wouldn't want my kid to watch that on television. And, as an adult, I don't have an issue with either of them.
Now personally, I would have banned Pink from television for her lack of talent, but that's just me. Point is, we see this all the time with female singers, with straight singers, with "Bi or pseudo lesbian" behavior from singers. Madonna and Britney tongue kissed on live TV back in 2003, and although it made a lot of press, neither of them were banned from an entire network or had their performance blurred to "protect" to virginal eyes of America.
What are we so afraid of? As a country, do we truly believe that if we show this gay kid kissing another guy on TV that he's going to convert millions of our youth to the dark side? Really? As if lesbianism or bisexuality is just a fad, but once you've been intimate with another penis, you'll never go back? Is this truly what America is so terrified of? Did you or your parents have an Elton John, Queen, or David Bowie record in your house growing up? Did you turn out OK? It's like saying that you'll grow up to be an axe murderer if you watch Friday the 13th. Really?
The rest of the world is laughing at us right now. The British have had nudity and full on cursing on public television for years now and their intelligence levels are far higher than those in the U.S. and their crime rates are much lower. There is no correlation between sex and violence on TV and sex and violence in the real world. There is however, a direct correlation between fear of sex and violence and acting out in those areas. Our taboos are our downfalls. We always want what we can't have, or can't see in this case.
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