Random Acts of Writing: The naked truth of the FCC
By Craig Carter
Thursday, February 7, 2008 10:45 AM PST
In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s nothing in the world I love more than mocking political people who take themselves way too seriously for their own good. Oftentimes, this mocking gives me an opportunity to write about things I usually wouldn’t get away with writing about if I were try to write about them on their own. For instance, women’s buttocks.
If I were to get a wild urge to write a column about women’s buttocks, chances are I’d get a call from my editor, saying, “Yeah, that’s cute Craig, but please tell me you have a backup column.”
However, if I write about the fact the Federal Communications Commission wants to fine the ABC television network $1.4 million because they aired images of a woman’s buttocks, that’s topical and column worthy. So I guess you could say it’s all in the way that you look at women’s buttocks.
Anyway, the naked caboose in question aired in 2003 on ABC’s cop show, “NYPD Blue,” wherein a boy surprises a woman as she’s preparing to take a shower.
The FCC claims there were, “multiple naked views of a woman’s naked buttocks” in the scene, and since I never really was a fan of that show, I’ll take the FCC’s word for it. Government agencies are usually pretty thorough about such things.
Well, being the wound-tight little bureaucracy it is, the FCC has a very strict policy about the airing of women’s naked hind end regions between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. After that, the networks can air a veritable booty-fest, but twixt those hours, naked cabooses are out of the question.
And let me just say I really want to meet the guy or woman at the FCC that monitors television shows for inappropriate views of naked buttocks and such. I wonder if such a job requires a college education, and if it does, what major course of study would one have to pursue to qualify? I think you’d have to have a college degree because only a well-educated person is able to discern if buttocks are naked or not.
That aside, I bet the job causes much stress at home.
“Don’t bother daddy now,” I can hear the wife of the FCC dude that monitors TV for naked buttocks telling their children. “He’s monitoring television shows for naked women’s buttocks.
I also want to thank the FCC for going to such lengths to protect me from naked women’s buttocks. I know that after greenhouse gases, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, women’s buttocks are the most dangerous threat to our security and freedom. And they don’t even have to be naked.
Laugh if you will, but just consider the fact that completely covered women’s buttocks launched Jennifer Lopez’s career, and then just stop to consider how many automobile accidents have been caused by men that were distracted by the sight of clothed women’s buttocks, walking down the street.
Still, the FCC wants to fine ABC more than a million bucks for, as they put it, “displaying sexual organs and excretory organs,” specifically, naked women’s buttocks. To which, I can only reply with my skeptical, mocking “Uh-huh.”
Without getting into the excretory/sexual aspect of this, let me just say I envy the husband of the actress in question because he’s one of very few men who can claim their wife has a million dollar hiney and actually mean it.
Aside from that, though, I think the actions of a government that thinks its function is to do this sort of thing speak for themselves.
I prefer to have a government that concerns itself with protecting me from things like terrorists, but if it thinks it can protect me from women’s buttocks as well, all I can say is more power to it. He said mockingly.
