In 2024, you will be able to access YouTube, one of the most popular media distributors in the United States and the world, and you will be able to watch Janet Jackson's 2004 performance at the Super Bowl. There are videos with his entire 11-minute performance and others that show just the three seconds that shook the country. Justin Timberlake, standing to Jackson's left and singing “you better have yourself naked / at the end of this song” from his song “Rock Your Body,” crosses his body, grabs his garment and pulls. A “wardrobe malfunction” occurs, and instead of revealing a pretty red bra, you see (not even for a second) her nearly bare chest, a star-shaped shield obscuring most of her nipple.
It's just a nipple. They are everywhere on the Internet now. But in 2004, people saw the Janet Jackson one and lost their minds. It was a brief and (since it aired in 1080i) blurry glimpse of a woman's mostly covered nipple, but it would quickly become one of the most visible nipples in television history, because it happened during the Super Bowl halftime show. Bowl, and that year. , more than 89 million people tuned in to the game. TiVo later declared it one of the most watched moments in the platform's history; Unsurprisingly, users repeatedly rewinded the broadcast to the moment of the exposition instead of the game-winning 41-yard field goal.
twitter and facebook and the feed-based news cycle didn't exist when Nipplegate happened. In 2004, the Internet spread among isolated forums, Usenet groups, and nascent social media platforms such as Livejournal and Myspace. There were no spaces online for the general public to gather and get collectively scared. So instead of processing the moment together online, people processed it the old-fashioned way, perhaps for the last time: in news clips, newspaper quotes, and a record number of complaints to the FCC.
Michael Powell, then head of the FCC, called the moment a “Classless, rude and deplorable trick.” and announced an investigation. CBS, which had aired the offensive mammary, banned Janet Jackson's music and excluded her from the Grammy Awards list (although Timberlake, absurd as it may seem, was still allowed to perform). CBS also banned MTV, which had produced the show, from producing all future halftime shows.
It also got weird and fast on the internet level. People wondered if Janet Jackson's nipple was intended to distract us all from the controversial war in Iraq. Others noted that then-beleaguered President George Bush was seizing the moment to criticize moral failures rather than improve his historically terrible approval numbers. (He would still be re-elected that year.) Disney even removed a statue of Jackson from one of its theme parks.
The discourse around accidental nudity has changed quite a bit since 2004, and yes, a lot of that is due to changes in nudity standards and a decline in powerful voices in censorship like the Parents Television and Media Council. But it also started to change because the way we watched television was about to change forever.
Phones were terrible with video back then. The Internet was even more for horny weirdos and college students (I was both) than for the general public. There was no convenient and fast way to stream videos unless you were downloading torrents. Even iconic photos from that year's Super Bowl, which highlight Janet Jackson's clear shock at the time, were harder to share online.
Jawed Karim, then a PayPal employee, missed the halftime show and therefore missed the one thing everyone wanted to talk about. He couldn't find it online either. He had been brainstorming startup ideas with his friends Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, and tech/news/2006-10-11-youtube-karim_x.htm”>the three decided that moments like this would need a place to catalog them and search them on the Internet. A few days later, they started working on an online video platform called YouTube.
Did Janet Jackson's nipple create YouTube and the future of streaming, online, on-demand, and virality-driven media all on its own? Maybe not exactly. But it certainly helped usher in new platforms and new ways for people to relive these momentous moments in culture together. Now, two decades later, broadcast television is almost dead, and the streaming services intended to replace it are fighting YouTube, which conquered the Internet and is now seeking to conquer television as well.
And it's not just about how television has changed. Now people also share great moments differently. Images and videos are no longer limited by bandwidth and are often available seconds after the incident occurs. Conversations are no longer limited to the forums and comment sections of your favorite blog. They're on Threads and instagram, where nipples are not allowed but invective is, and on x, where both nipples and invective are allowed and encouraged. People process big events in remixes and memes on TikTok and in embarrassing posts with ai-generated art on facebook. Everything happens so quickly and in such large quantities that something like a tear no longer seems as momentous as it once did.
And because that content is shared on the Internet rather than on broadcast television, there are no standards to regulate it. You no longer write to the FCC. You complain about an exposed nipple on YouTube. You put a comment on the video; maybe report it to Google. The platforms may or may not care. But there will be other nipples. Sports are broadcast on a delay to prevent things like locker room malfunctions from happening, but the internet moves too fast.
Even the FCC has evolved since those days. Powell, the former commissioner, he told ESPN in 2014 that he thought it was “really unfair” that Jackson, and not Timberlake, was on the receiving end of all the fallout from the wardrobe malfunction. “Actually, if you slow down, it's Justin ripping off his shell.” He also said that the idea of the FCC protecting you from harmful images on your television was already over thanks to the Internet. “I just think it's probably a bygone era.”
The great irony of Nipplegate, and perhaps its true legacy, is that something like this could travel much faster and more widely now, and yet, in large part because of what happened on that stage in 2004, because of the change it caused From both a technological and cultural point of view, it would not be so important. After all, it's just a nipple.
