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First Janet Jackson, Now Nipple Video Banned
(submitted by gekkogecko)
Oddly Enough - Reuters to My Yahoo!
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Four months after Janet Jackson
outraged the United States by bearing her breast on
TV, Ireland has banned a video to encourage voting in
next month's European elections because it shows a
bare nipple.
In Britain, where bare breasts are shown daily in
tabloid newspapers, the film will be shown in censored
form. The breast-feeding sequence survives but shots
of the offending nipple have been edited out.
The 45-second film was produced by the European
Parliament's audio-visual department and shows a
suckling baby trying to decide which of its mother's
breasts to feed from.
The idea is to show people making choices -- like
voters at the ballot box.
While the sight of a baby suckling at its mother's
breast is considered acceptable for hundreds of
millions of other Europeans, Irish officials believe
it would cause offence in Roman Catholic Ireland.
"I decided that due to sensitivities here, this is not
the right image to promote anything in Ireland, unless
it is of a medical or scientific nature," the head of
the European Parliament's Irish office, Jim O'Brien,
said.
Ireland, where over 90 percent of the population is
Catholic, is traditionally conservative on issues of
sexuality. Abortion is illegal and homosexuality was
decriminalized only in 1993.
Jackson caused a furor in February when in a Super
Bowl halftime performance her duet partner Justin
Timberlake ripped open her costume to expose her right
breast during a live coast-to-coast telecast by
American network CBS.
In Britain, film advert regulators found the suckling
shot racy, likening the image to "the sort of breast
shot you would associate with a men's magazine."
A member of the four-man, four-woman Cinema
Advertising Association (CAA) panel, which took the
decision, said they found that they ended up looking
at the breast and not the baby.
"It was literally the breast full screen size with an
erect nipple side on and the infant gazing across at
them," said Greg Lyons, a copy consultant at the CAA.
"The panel found themselves looking at something that
was very difficult for them," he said. "The infant was
contemplating the breasts in rather an adult way."
Rosie Dodds, policy research officer for Britain's
National Childbirth Trust, said the advert could have
been innovative and striking.
"I do think it is a pity that we make the link between
the sexuality of breasts and their nutritive
function," she said.
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