Cable offers new adventures in slime

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

The station is WWOR, Channel 9, from New York, now delivered to us through our cable system.

It's not an x-rated station. We don't subscribe to it. It comes free with our basic package, and like most every other TV station, it's packed full of news and talk shows and re-runs.

Last Thursday at 7 a.m. the station showed "James Bond Jr.," followed by "Widget," "Head of the Class," "It's a Living," "Jenny Jones" and "Nine Broadcast Live."

Nine Broadcast Live is the subject of this column.

Last week was school vacation, which meant that at 11 a.m. a lot of kids, who'd slept late and hadn't begun their day yet, were sitting in front of a TV clicking away. Now there are some people who like to say that kids shouldn't be sitting in front of a TV at 11 a.m., and maybe they shouldn't be. But should or shouldn't, the fact is they do. Most of the stuff they watch is pretty harmless. What was on Channel 9 was not.

Six women, three with huge breasts, three with small breasts, were sitting, standing, posing, parading, displaying in string bikinis, every part of their bodies TV would allow. A raucous audience was cheering them on. And a talk show host strutted about in his glory, setting the big-breasted women against the small-breasted women, as if they were a pack of prize hefers.

My 15-year-old who happened on the show, watched for a minute then called me out of my office. "Look at this. Look at these women. Listen to this man. I can't believe this is on TV. I can't believe this is allowed!"

I watched the show for maybe 15 minutes. I couldn't stomach any more. It was the most vile, exploitive, foul, unredeemable, denigrating garbage I have ever seen on television in my life.

The host, named Richard something, was slime.

"How old are you?" he asked one of the big-breasted trio. The young woman didn't want to tell her age, but he pressed, and she did.

"Nineteen," she said.

"That's the smallest number associated with you, isn't it?" he said, leering.

He made a number of such comments. "I wore this jacket especially for today. It's double-breasted." He said about the small-breasted women: "They're triple A, like the automobile club. If you didn't see their faces, you wouldn't know which way they were facing." He was the kind of guy you'd cross the street to avoid.

The women were hardly model citizens themselves. By virtue of appearing on the show, they invited the base treatment they got. They presented themselves as sex toys. They set the tone. The show had nowhere to go except straight into the gutter, and straight into the gutter it went.

Unfortunately, a camera followed.

One of the women called herself Nicki Knockers.

"Can you jog with those things?" Richard something asked her. "Can you swim? How do you sleep?"

Some guy, who said he was an actor, joined the women on the stage. "I love big breasts," he announced, then sat on the lap of the biggest breasted woman. "They're something you can hold on to. When I masturbate I fantasize about big breasts."

Truth, his words.

"You women with small breasts, you don't have anything," this guy continued. "You look more like little boys than women. Why don't you get those things enlarged."

"I'm sure some women would like to enlarge some of your parts," one of the small-breasted women retorted.

And so it went. I shut off the TV, returned to my office and called my older daughter who is at college.

"That show's slime, Mom. A few weeks ago they had on women who like being beaten when they have sex. It's always demeaning to women. It's a horrible show."

No one forces anyone to watch this garbage, I know. Press a button and it's gone.

Except it isn't. It's there on the tube. It's there in our houses, and people just channel surfing - young people, old people, normal people, abnormal people - see it and watch and are affected by what they see.

Sure, many are repulsed by the stuff; but many more revel in it, are guided by it, get permission from it because if some well-paid television host can talk about big knockers, if some sick actor can sit on a woman's lap and brag about his sexual fantasies, if seeing this, the audience laughs and the women being mocked just sit and smile, then virtually everything goes and anything is allowed.

The public being harmed by this show. In America every day, 1,871 women are raped, 61 percent of them under the age of 18. The millions of Americans who watched this show didn't see women as people. They saw them as objects, as things to be used. Rape is the next step.

The women won't mind - see, they're smiling. The audience is laughing. The talk show host is joking.

It's all a big joke.

And that's most of the problem.