Jack White and kreen deconstruct Nipplegate

And number 44 isn't really even a "decision," just an opportunity to complain that Justin Timberlake didn't face any consequences for exposing Janet Jackson's boob.

You don't think that it was pre-planned to gain some press and notoriety?

By that time Janet Jackson's career was essentially over, anyways.

I have the vague recollection that years later the participants basically admitted, "Yeah, we did that on purpose".

In their rush to virtue-signal their "metoo" bona fides, people forget that 1- Janet Jackson was already on a commercial decline by that point, as younger and hipper female singers were replacing her, and 2- since it was a part of her body that was revealed, and not a part of Timberlake's, of course she was the one who was the most ridiculed. If she had ripped a part of Justin's pants off and his butt had been revealed for the world to see, he'd have been the one considered the butt (!) of the joke.

It's only in recent years that this story has begun to always be discussed from the point of view that "the REAL scandal is that Justin didn't get blamed but Janet did, because patriarchy". Before, other angles prevailed, from "celebrities will stop at nothing to get people's attention" and "the music industry thrives on corrupting people's morals" to "Americans are prudes who can't handle nudity" and "the Superbowl should be about sports, period." Every five years the "moral" of the story gets reinterpreted to fit the zeitgest.

Yeah but it didn't dominate. It wasn't the go-to opinion on the matter by the average low-information, low-involvement "cultural commentator". It's replaced the previous bienpensant take, which was "Americans don't care when they see blood and violence on TV, but show them a bit of nudity and they almost faint."