Why Your Super Bowl Slut-Shaming is Sexist

The Super Bowl halftime show is no stranger to cultural criticism and controversy. In fact, Janet Jackson’s “nipple-gate” wardrobe malfunction might still be a sensitive source of puritanical malaise and moralistic horror for some. But despite its socially-sordid past, and status as the one show America can’t help but critique, I never anticipated that in the aftermath of this year’s performances by world-famous recording artists, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, women’s bodies would once again be the basis of halftime show hysteria. 

Halftime hardly ended before disgruntled viewers descended upon social media to decry Shakira and JLo’s performances as sexually explicit and degrading. The controversy took me by surprise. I watched the performance live with my children, and felt nothing short of awe and inspiration at the sight of the talented women who took the Super Bowl stage. I grew up listening to their music, and was thrilled that these women, both over the age of 40, were commanding an audience of nearly 100 million

This is an impressive feat for any performer regardless of age or gender. but it is especially so in a society where women are not allowed to age without becoming culturally insignificant, invisible and irrelevant, a phenomenon even more pronounced in the entertainment industry where women’s professional opportunities peak by age 30. In a country where booming cosmetic surgery and beauty industries make aging naturally a socially-subversive act for female faces, two women refusing to fade into fame’s ageist oblivion—and demonstrating that deteriorating youth no longer has to be a death sentence—was refreshing. 

If defying sexist standards for women “of a certain age” in music was not enough to make social justice-loving hearts everywhere soar, then the fact that both women on the Super Bowl stage were Latinas surely did.

Latina performers front and center on one of America’s most beloved stages seemed a critical, cultural counter to an era in which social hostility, hate and human rights atrocities against immigrants will characterize this chapter in our country’s history. All of this is, of course, condoned and compelled by a President who makes maligning Latinxs as subhumaninvaders” his personal practice. 

Rather than bask in the sheer reverence and acclaim their socially and culturally significant Super Bowl performances should have elicited, Shakira and JLo stepped off the NFL stage and straight into one of America’s other favorite past-times: slut-shaming.

Critics pounded their “bad woman” gongs and covered their chaste daughters’ eyes, lest the sexy specter of JLo lead girls everywhere to storm their middle-schools in glitzy leotards and enroll in pole-dance classes, a true American horror story for some. 

While America never shies away from criticizing women for not “covering up,” the criticism leveled at two Latina performers for their lack of clothing seems particularly confounding from an American audience that has witnessed similarly scantily-clad past performances. Music mavens Beyonce and Lady Gaga both donned little more than leotard-like ensembles in not-so-long-ago Super Bowl halftime shows, with Gaga even baring her midriff (Gasp).

The half-naked history of Super Bowl performers makes the elicit outrage over JLo and Shakiras’ “bared necessities” seem more suspect. Latinas may be particularly vulnerable to hypersexualized social perceptions due to the fact that they are routinely depicted as overtly sexual by American media. The cultural refusal to see Latin women beyond narrow, limited representations of domestic workers and sultry, seductive, heteronormative, sex kittens may begin to explain why Shakira and JLo might be more severely scrutinized for performing sexuality.       

Women performing sexuality on their own terms should be heralded by a culture that sexualizes and objectifies women’s bodies against their will, and without their permission, in mainstream media, online, and on American streets every day. Most women can attest that no amount of “covering up,” on stage or off, saves them from the kind of catcalling and street harassment that color the collective experience of female personhood in our society. Despite existing in a culture that sexualizes women so often it almost feels like a professional sport of its own, women on a sports mega-stage, claiming their sexuality for themselves, are met with the kind of shock, scorn, and condemnation conspicuously absent from other routine, patriarchal portrayals of women. 

This year’s Super Bowl controversy is symptomatic of a cultural-fixation with the female form, the naked sight of which is no matter at all when exploited to line the pocketbooks of male-dominated corporate interests. Yet when women themselves choose to expose parts of their bodies publicly for no one, and no matter, but themselves, they are called profane, immoral, and distasteful. Their character and worth are not only questioned, but presumed less, by their purported lack of clothing. They are accused of being “bad examples” of womanhood, of lacking self-respect, degrading their gender, and “sending the wrong message” regarding sexual consent—or lack thereof. 

Women’s bodies and voluntary performance of sexuality neither degrade them, nor license rape culture to violate them. Women are, however, degraded by the continued cultural contention that women be “sexual” only in service of men, but otherwise “virginal.” American women are likewise degraded by systemic sexual harassment, sexual and domestic violence and exploitation, a gender pay gap, government restrictions on our human rights to bodily autonomy and integrity, a lack of adequate representation at the highest levels of American government and society and inadequate constitutional protection from gender discrimination. 

The problem is not women’s bodies, or the mere sight of them. The problem is a culture that judges women primarily by how they look, or what they wear or don’t wear, and constantly cuts them down to size through a cruel and fatal combination of diet culture and unrealistic, unattainable standards of female beauty.

If female degradation was really such a grave social concern to these folks, they might spend less time condemning empowered women on a Super Bowl stage and more time engaged in the kind of cultural critiques and conversations required for meaningful change. When it comes to women’s continued status in American society as the “second sex,” it is sexism, not the sight of their bodies, that’s to blame. 

About

Ashley Jordan is a feminist writer, activist and organizer and a licensed attorney and former prosecutor who specialized in domestic violence cases. She has taught Gender and Women’s Studies courses at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois and researched and written extensively on issues of feminism and gender equality. She is the founder of Women Activists, a women’s rights activism group in Wisconsin, and the feminist blog FashionForwardFeminist.com. You can find her @feministforward.