All I can say is indignation. It’s what I felt and still feel about Super Bowl LIV’s halftime show featuring Shakira and Jennifer Lopez. After NBC posted on Facebook their question about the half time show, I felt the urgent need to remind people that the Super Bowl, as well as other major sporting events are targets for human trafficking.
I made a comment, and I have been judged as a racist bigot, a girl who couldn’t get a man if I wanted one, anti-Latin culture, uneducated. However, let’s get to the heart of the matter. Sunday’s half-time show didn’t reflect Latino culture, unless Latino culture tells us that it’s okay to sexually exploit our children.
I get that in the entertainment business, sex sells. If want to be be relevant or even sell an album, there has to be a level of comfort with selling yourself. According to a USA Today article by Gil Smart “There was nothing about the halftime show that shocked, from a cultural standpoint. Our culture, after all, is marinated in sex, with hardcore porn easily available on those smartphones you all gave your kids.” And as much as I hate to admit it, Gil is correct; except that typically we can block those things which we don't want our children to have access to.
This being said, we are now teaching that it is okay to objectify women. One of the comments my post on Facebook garnered was from a man who said "Yeah, I love a little pole dancing.” My initial thought was “until it’s your child, your daughter, sister or someone close to you.” So desensitized to sex have we become that we have people on twitter saying "is there a middle ground between the Super Bowl Half Time show is literally sex Trafficking?” and “It's the most empowering women I have ever seen and I am watching with my 10 YO son.” Really? How can we even question this?
I also realize that every NFL team has cheerleaders. Nothing burns my biscuits more than my hearing a man saying “I love the top cats…they are the only cats we like.” So it shouldn’t be shocking that most men don’t have an issue with the NFL’s half-time show. One of my friend’s friends wrote on Facebook, “The only people complaining are the women, its only because they can’t do this or that and their man liked it.” Well I am a woman, I don’t have a man and I didn't like it and I can do everything Shakira did, and if I wanted to take pole dancing to build my core, I could at my local gym.”
Dr. Michael Brown wrote an article on Christian Post where he asks “Moms, are these the kind of shows you want your husbands and sons to watch? Or your daughters to emulate? Speaking of mothers, both Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, the featured performers at the last Super Bowl, are moms themselves, probably very devoted moms. And JLo even brought her 11-year-old daughter on stage to perform with her. But that makes the performance all the more outrageous. A 50-year-old mother in the presence of her daughter, performing on a stripper’s pole?”
Among other comments made on the NBC Facebook post were comments on my looks as well as comments that “I would go to the beach and not have an issue with what people are wearing.” Evidently these people have never been to the beach with me. I take it seriously when I read in Proverbs 31:10 A capable wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. (NRSV) and Proverbs 31:30 Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. (NRSV). I don’t limit that just to myself, but to young girls and young ladies that we are raising to be the next women leaders in the US.
You see we have become a nation that is so drenched in sex that we can’t even admit when we see something that is wrong and that borders on the porn industry’s exploitation of sex. Kristin Smith writes, “It’s becoming more widely known that the Super Bowl and sex trafficking are notoriously linked. The crowds the event draws, and the distractions it can create, makes the “big game” a horrifically bad issue. In fact, nearly 200 people were arrested last year in connection with 2019’s Super Bowl in Atlanta. But it’s not just the Super Bowl that’s a problem. It’s the world-wide epidemic of sex slavery that the real culprit. And the United States is one of the biggest contributors to this horrific industry. How, you ask? Well, one way is in the connection between viewing pornography and sex slavery. According to Fight The New Drug, “the porn industry fuels real people being sexually abused and exploited at the hands of family members, traffickers, and pimps. The collective billions of clicks to porn content directly fuels the demand for sex traffickers to make money by selling videos of their sex slaves to porn sites.”
According to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE) “Some may be tempted to write off the Super Bowl LIV halftime performance as harmless, but the reality is that stripping and sex trafficking are inextricably linked. Many of the women—minors, in some cases—in strip clubs have been sex trafficked.”
And while many are saying that people like Franklin Graham, Dr. Brown and myself are over reacting and are hateful and bigoted, I have to wonder why they call themselves Christians? How does bowing down and worshipping at the altar of sexual exploitation in the name of entertainment fit in with their Christian faith? As Christians we must reject the hyper-sexualized content like that of the Super Bowl Half-time Show.
I agree with Lucas Black, actor in Fast and Furious and NCIS: New Orleans Protecting your daughter and sons from seeing the display of sexual exploitation at the #SuperBowl halftime show is showing love. We have to teach our younger generation that their value and self worth comes from what God says is true about them.
Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
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