In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.
There was something in the air in the 2000s. It was as though American culture was obsessed with ripping away women’s clothes and then blaming them for it. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian. Upskirt photos, leaked sex tapes, leaked nudes; teary-eyed apologies, snide jokes on late-night television, righteous op-eds in the newspapers. Every day we were acting out literally what was happening in the cultural marketplace, where women faced commercial and structural pressures to market themselves with highly sexualized images and then were called whores and sluts for doing so.
Perhaps no event more clearly captures this moment in cultural history than what happened to Janet Jackson after the Wardrobe Malfunction of 2004.
The Wardrobe Malfunction (also known as Nipplegate) occurred on February 1, 2004, during the Super Bowl 38 halftime show live on CBS. Pop supernova Janet Jackson had finished performing her 1989 classic “Rhythm Nation,” and the young up-and-comer Justin Timberlake had just joined her onstage to croon his new single “Rock Your Body.” As Timberlake arrived at his final line — “Gotta have you naked by the end of this song” — he reached for Jackson’s black leather bustier and tugged. The leather collapsed, and Jackson’s breast, partially obscured by a silver nipple shield, appeared on TV for nine-sixteenths of a second.
For that fraction of a second, the FCC would receive a record 540,000 complaints and fine CBS a record $550,000 (the fee was later voided by a federal appeals court, which noted that advocacy groups may have been behind many of the complaints). Jackson would see her career go into a tailspin from which it would never truly recover.
She was disinvited from the Grammys. Her new album was panned. When she showed up on TV for interviews and performances, many stations made a point of announcing they had adopted a five-second delay, lest she be tempted to show her breasts to America again. Her songs stopped playing on the radio, on MTV, on VH1. Sales of her music plummeted.
The consensus at the time was that Jackson brought all this on herself on purpose — that she had cunningly plotted to expose her bare breast on TV in a tacky publicity stunt, a sleazy demand for attention from an aging pop star past her prime.
Jackson herself maintained otherwise. What actually happened, she said, was that Timberlake was supposed to have removed part of her bustier to reveal a red bra in a sort of PG-13 striptease — but he ended up accidentally ripping the bra along with the rest of her top.
This story made little impact. Neither did photographs of the aftermath of the so-called Malfunction, which saw Jackson huddling into her torn clothing and trying desperately to cover herself, with the face of a woman who very much did not intend to show America her nipple.
Everyone seemed to instinctively know, back then, that when a woman’s body and sexuality were violated, the person to blame was the woman, especially if she was a woman of color. She brought it on herself by having a body.
From the vantage point of 2021, the racial and gender overtones of that credo look fairly clear. Even Timberlake, who despite doing the actual clothes-ripping received almost none of the blame for the malfunction, acknowledged as much. “America’s harsher on women” and “ethnic people,” he explained to MTV in 2006. (Earlier this year, Timberlake offered an apology to Jackson for letting her take the fall.)
But it’s worth taking a closer look at how the controversy interacted with what had been Jackson’s image up until the 2004 Super Bowl. For much of her career, Janet Jackson was an exemplar for an unusually carefree model of the sexuality of Black women, an icon of a Black woman whose sexuality was neither predatory nor shameful but only unapologetically focused on her own pleasure. The Wardrobe Malfunction ripped that image to shreds, in ways that still have consequences today.
“She’s one cool girl, this Janet Jackson”
Janet Jackson debuted her first album in 1982. She was 16 years old, managed by her father Joe Jackson, and at Joe’s insistence just beginning to transition away from her child star acting roles into the sort of music Joe approved of for a young lady: sweet bubblegum pop.
Two weeks after Janet Jackson came out to modest critical and commercial success, another Jackson dropped a record. Janet’s older brother Michael released the instantly iconic Thriller, and from then on it looked as though the story of Janet Jackson was set. She would be one of the also-ran Jacksons, one of the siblings who wasn’t Michael. She was, the public seemed quick to conclude, riding on his coattails to fame with a passable voice, admittedly impressive dance skills, and a few forgettable tunes.
Instead of accepting this second-rate status, Janet Jackson changed the narrative. She fired her father, brought in new producers and a new image consultant, and in 1986 she released the album that would be her commercial breakthrough. It was called Control, as in Janet Jackson is in… . It sent the message that Janet Jackson was no longer an also-ran. She was one of the Jacksons to watch.
Control, for which Jackson took a co-writer and co-producer credit, was her first bestseller. It would go on to sell over 10 million copies and earned Jackson approving press blurbs about how she was “more than a little sister.” Along with its 1989 follow-up Rhythm Nation (12 million copies), Control established the paradox that would come to underly Jackson’s star image for the next decade.
Jackson seemed to represent coolness. With her sharp, confident dancing, her swagger, her style, she was right at the cutting edge of all that was in vogue. But the second she stepped off a stage, her screen presence would turn in on itself. All of a sudden, she would become utterly reserved, sweetly shy and apparently eager to please.
That quality was endearing, a New York Times critic wrote in a 1990 review of a Janet Jackson concert. It kept her from seeming threatening. “Miss Jackson herself is clearly diligent and eager to please,” critic Jon Pareles wrote. “She’s pushing herself onstage — she sweats — and her relative inexperience keeps her from seeming arrogant. Trying to replicate the unearthly perfection of a longtime trouper like her brother may be impossible, and it’s not exactly a good long-term strategy. But in her first tour, she works hard enough and comes close enough to make a listener want to root for her.”
“She’s cool and very self-possessed,” wrote a reporter for Spin in 1987, in a paragraph that conflated Jackson’s social restraint with her refusal to eat during a photo shoot. “Janet gives off the kind of keep-your-distance signals that can chill any attempt at overfamiliarity. … While everyone else stuffs his face over the course of the three-hour shoot, Janet doesn’t eat much. Just an apple, an occasional grape. She’s one cool girl, this Janet Jackson.”
If you like, you could read Spin’s both approving and somewhat mystifying argument that Jackson’s cool temperament and cool appetite are connected as a way of talking about a different appetite: a sexual appetite. The classic racist trope in American pop culture is to imagine Black women as sexually voracious and predatory, their bodies lustful and out of control. But it was clear early on that Janet Jackson kept a firm lid on her desires: She was one cool girl. That would be important when she began developing her image further.
With 1993’s Janet (officially stylized janet.), Jackson introduced a major new element to the star image she had begun to build: sex. Jackson’s early albums had included chastity ballads about waiting for marriage, but Janet featured songs about oral sex, masturbation, and general good old-fashioned fucking (within the confines of a monogamous heterosexual relationship of mutual affection and respect).
“Sex has been an important part of me for several years,” Jackson explained to Rolling Stone, in a cover story that showed her then-husband René Elizondo Jr. cupping her bare breasts with his hands. “But it just hasn’t blossomed publicly until now. I’ve had to go through some changes and shed some old attitudes before feeling completely comfortable with my body. Listening to my new record, people intuitively understand the change in me.”
Improbably, the critics went wild. Even in 1993, it was clear that Jackson’s move was a very big deal. American culture was rarely willing to see Black women as fully sexualized and fully human at the same time — but Jackson had managed to pull off the balancing act without letting anyone rob her of her dignity in the process.
“Janet.’s Janet is a more complete sexual being than most of pop’s black women are allowed or allow themselves to be,” Rolling Stone acknowledged in its review. “A significant, even revolutionary transition in the sexual history and popular iconography of black women — who have historically needed to do nothing to be considered overtly sexual — is struck as the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? girl declares herself the what-I’ll-do-to-you-baby! woman. The princess of America’s black royal family has announced herself sexually mature and surrendered none of her crown’s luster in the process. Black women and their friends, lovers and children have a victory in Janet.”
Jackson’s transition from sweet teenybopper to sexual woman was a game changer. It established the template that generations of pop stars would follow in the decades to come: not just Beyoncé and Rihanna, but also white singers like Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. They know what to do as they set themselves up to perform maturity because they saw Janet Jackson successfully pull it off first.
And part of what made Jackson’s unapologetic sexuality in her albums and on the dance floor so palatable to critics was that she was so shy whenever she wasn’t performing.
In the Rolling Stone cover story, journalist David Ritz describes watching Jackson shoot the music video for her new single “If,” which features some mock cunnilingus. “I’m stimulated,” Ritz admits — but he finds to his apparent dismay that he is unable to say as much to Jackson’s face.
“As silly as it sounds, I sense myself protecting her from the brashness of my own balls-out approach,” Ritz muses. “What is it? Wholesomeness — that’s what it is. Femininity. Up close, in the flesh, she’s being so damn sincere, I question my own sincerity; Janet Jackson gives off a good-girl vibe that only a cad would challenge. Despite this new album and its preoccupation with carnal knowledge, despite this battery of sizzling videos, Janet silently demands decorum on the part of an interviewer.”
Embedded in this passage is the general idea that by dancing in an overtly sexual manner, Jackson has put sex on the conversational table. But what Ritz calls Jackson’s “good-girl vibe” has prevented that transition from actually taking place. Her endearing diligence — that underdog A-student good girl reserve the New York Times spotted in Jackson in 1990 — seems to be somehow protecting her from any prurience.
It was this contradiction, Ritz would conclude, this “tension between the erotic and the innocent” that was “the essence of Janet Jackson.”
Perhaps no one without the status of a Jackson, part of R&B’s royal family, could have walked such a fine line. Regardless, Janet Jackson did it. She managed to unapologetically perform a Black female sexuality that was joyous and unashamed, and the critics didn’t even try to condemn her for it.