If you are the member of a privileged group AND call yourself progressive

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

172. My point is this...

I can understand how a woman would see MacFarlane's bit as another example of a demeaning attitude toward women, but I really don't think that's what was intended. My take on this was that Hollywood has been peddling T & A (almost exclusively women's T & A) for decades, and while nudity can be tastefully and even be justified under certain conditions, it always seems like the women who are naked in the shower and not the men. If the car is going to drive away and yank off the clothing of the innocent person whose garments were caught in the car door -- that innocent person is a woman every time.

Hollywood has been juvenile and sophomoric about women's bodies, and they've made a lot of money at it. I didn't look on MacFarlane's bit as a "celebration" of juvenile and sophomoric nudity, rather an attempt to mock those attitudes. It's like he was saying, "You know how stupid this song sounds? Well that's what you've been sounding like for years."

Am I giving MacFarlane too much credit? Too much benefit of the doubt? Maybe. Maybe the bit needed a little more of a pointed edge to it, so that viewers understood explicitly that he wasn't just being puerile. But that's the balancing act with satire -- get too explicit and you lose the funny, stay too funny and you lose the point. Believe it or not, there WERE people in Jonathan Swift's day who thought he was being serious with "A Modest Proposal," so this sort of humor isn't as easy as it looks.