Culture

Pop Culture: Golden girls gone wild

Greg Beato

A month ago, in a convivial, comfy-chaired chat with host Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America, 62-year-old actress Diane Keaton showed exactly why G-rated adjectives do not sufficiently convey the extent of her charm, when, in the course of complimenting Sawyer, she exclaimed, “I’d like to have lips like that. Then I wouldn’t have worked on my fucking personality. Or my ... excuse me. My personality. If I had lips like yours, I’d be better off. My life would be better. I’d be married.”

More recently, while appearing on a Valentine’s Day segment of the Today show, 70-year-old actress Jane Fonda deployed the C-word when discussing her experiences performing in The Vagina Monologues. When host Meredith Vieira suggested that Fonda wasn’t initially a “big fan” of the popular play about chatty genitalia, Fonda replied, “Well, it wasn’t that I wasn’t a big fan—I hadn’t seen the play. I live in Georgia, okay? I was asked to do a monologue called ‘Cunt,’ and I said, ‘I don’t think so, I’ve got enough problems.’”

Like Keaton, Fonda expressed the verboten word with a hint of humor but no great emphasis, and certainly no desire to titillate, shock or offend. Keaton immediately recognized her faux pas and excused herself. Fonda didn’t even seem to realize she had just said a word you don’t typically hear on broadcast TV, but Vieira apologized for her later in the show. In neither instance was an apology necessary. These weren’t moments of indecency. These were human moments—warm, funny and inspiring. How nice to see these women so comfortable in their skins, so candid and unrehearsed.

The Parents Television Council had a different opinion. These Culture Wars entrepreneurs make their living complaining about the need to protect the nation’s children from swear words and innuendo on TV shows that children mostly don’t watch—if today’s 10-year-olds are cutting class to catch actresses from the ’70s chat it up with news personalities from the ’80s on morning television, the problem isn’t television, it’s school!—and they were not about to let Jane Fonda’s unexpected Valentine’s Day offering to them go unexploited.

A headline on the PTC’s website claimed NBC had “assault[ed] families” with its programming. “There is no excuse for airing one of the most patently offensive words in the English language on broadcast television, especially at the breakfast hour ...” its president, Tim Winter, elaborated. “Millions of families were indeed offended.”

How Winter divined this, he didn’t make clear. While the Today show is watched by around 6 million people each day, only viewers in the Eastern time zone actually heard Fonda’s unedited remarks. By the time NBC aired the segment everywhere else, its technicians had given Fonda’s phrase the aural equivalent of a Brazilian bikini wax; nothing remained of it except silence. Nor did Winter explain how millions of families managed to convey their offense to him in the space of the few hours that elapsed between Fonda’s utterance and the PTC’s response to it—the man must have a very robust voicemail system.

Fox News finger-wagger Bill O’Reilly was outraged at Fonda’s impropriety, too. “This isn’t the first time celebrities have used bad language on TV,” he divulged in an exclusive scoop. Then, to illustrate the phenomenon, he showed a montage of previously televised celebrity profanity. Curiously, it excluded any instances of celebrity men swearing on live TV, like Bono saying “fucking” at the Golden Globes or Dale Earnhardt Jr. saying “shit” after a NASCAR race. Instead it focused solely on women of a certain age: Diane Keaton, Sally Field, Cher, Madonna, Kathy Griffin.

“Jane Fonda would never [curse] on my program,” the linguistic dominatrix growled, like a strict nun getting ready to rap a student’s knuckles with a ruler, or maybe a stale falafel. “Either would Diane Keaton or any of the other pinheads. They’d never dare do it here. You know why? Because they’d be called on it. And they’d be humiliated in front of millions of people.”

Alas, O’Reilly was too busy sharing his weird humiliation fantasies to note America’s remarkable recovery from Fonda’s surprise attack. Indeed, only morals pimps eager to profit from the incident preoccupied themselves with it; the rest of the country simply went on with its day. John McCain held a campaign rally in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The sophomores beat the first-year players in the NBA All-Star Rookie Challenge. Shares of the Cognex Corporation rose $4.40 in heavy afternoon trading. And somewhere, one hopes, Jill Clayburgh and Meryl Streep and Marsha Mason were calling Bill O’Reilly and the Parents Television Council unprintable things.

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