This Week In Hating
Rear Gear for dogs exposes us as the new Victorians
Rear Gear, butt covers for your dog or cat
It all started here in Houston in 2004, when Justin Timberlake, in the middle of Reliant Stadium, "accidentally" showed off Janet Jackson's bizarre nippleware for a fraction of a second.
Oh my God, a breast. Over half a million concerned citizens wrote to the FCC to complain, two filed lawsuits — lawsuits! — and Viacom, parent company of CBS, agreed to pay $3.5 million in FCC fines, though the issue is still to this day being disputed in the courts.
Welcome to the beginning of the age of the easily offended.
Since then, to a certain segment of the population, anything not appropriate for an 8-year-old is subject to banishment from the airwaves.
Following the Grammys, I enjoyed perusing a smattering a FCC complaints posted on The Smoking Gun. From a relatively tame and tape-delayed awards show, people wrote in to express their disgust at Lady Gaga's "frontal crotch area," Beyoncé's "grabbing her crotch," rapper's silenced lyrics and Pink's too-sheer "nude suit."
One viewer from Savannah, Texas, wrote that "this show was not appropriate for me — at nearly 40 — much less my 6-year-old," and added that "Enzyte, feminine products, and cheat-on-your-spouse ads" were also inappropriate. Lady, if at 40 you can't handle seeing skimpy costumes and tampon commercials, maybe you should just turn the TV off.
And stay far, far away from the Internet — you don't even want to know what goes on here.
But don't worry, the Puritan fervor hasn't just caught on in new media. Book banning has come back into vogue with a surprising force. This year one Wisconsin mother tried to have seven books — including the "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series — banned from a middle school library. Despite the fact the school already had a screening system in place where parents could block books from their own children that they felt were inappropriate.
Yet, this mom still felt that the district needed to supersede her judgement over that of each individual parent and child. Luckily, the board voted unanimously against her.
But the most over-the-top expression of American's fear of the nakedness? A new product called Rear Gear, designed to hang from a dog's tail and cover up its unseemly pooper.
Rear Gear claims to "cover your pet's rear while boosting their confidence," but I can only imagine that any animal that found itself sporting a butt tassel would die of embarrassment. Dogs are not embarrassed of their butts, and I know this because they spend to much of their time smelling other dog butts.
Not to mention, if the point is to distract from a pooch's naked posterior, a colorful tag waving in front of it might not be the best solution.
Sure, the Victorians invented table skirts, lest men find the furniture legs too sexually stimulating, but even they left their dogs alone.
