Monday, September 20, 2010

Sainz's attiire only out-of-place in boring America

Since sports talk radio is still talking about it, I’m going to throw in my two-cents about this Ines Sainz controversy. It is only “controversial” because America’s cultural mores has taught us that sex needs to be kept undercover, that women dressing in a revealing manner demeans them, and that men don’t know how to “act” when confronted by overt sexuality. There are, admittedly, some American women who want attention, but are nonetheless offended by that attention if it comes from the “wrong” person. But this is a problem uniquely American in western society; it dates back from the days when this country was initially populated by Puritans and governed by intolerant religious types. Thus Sainz’s wet T-shirt and jeans look may have seemed a tad bit deliberately provocative to the New York Jets players who responded with cat-calls and coaches tossing footballs in her direction. And she seemed to be saying to them “Look at me. Ain’t I one hot babe?” And so some of the players said. “You want to get our attention? OK, this is the attention we’ll give you.”

The problem, in reality, is that Sainz thought her attire was perfectly natural, acceptable and ho-hum to her target audience. Sainz isn’t here for American consumption. She works for TV Azteca in Mexico, and the only reason she is covering Jets games is because quarterback Mark Sanchez rates as a currently hot number in Mexico. Her reports appear only on Spanish-language television. In Latin America, where the Euro-elites dominate the media just as they do in the social, economic and political sphere, blonde-haired Caucasian females make frequent appearances, and they set the standard for what passes for attractiveness. You never see any black people on Spanish-language TV; when indigenous or mixed race people appear (the stereotypical “little brown ones”), they are either the maid, the gardener, or some annoying troublemaker demanding his rights.

Shocking as it may seem to boring American feminists, women of European extraction in Latin America seem to take pleasure in displaying their assets; ample cleavage (often of the enhanced variety) and thigh-high skirts are typical of even established TV news anchors, and makes Fox News’ strumpets look positively Victorian. The modestly-endowed Katie Couric wouldn’t make the first cut. I recently observed two car wash exercises by kids raising money for a “Mission to Mexico,” meaning kids from a church group heading down to some impoverished Mexican Indian village to teach the virtues of the evangelical religion; the first group were white kids, the girls were wearing short shorts. The second group were apparently FBI (Full-Blooded Indian), and the girls hear wearing their idea of sexy attire—those multi-colored skirts whose hems reached the ground; I remember seeing pictures of Peruvian women in these outfits in a geography textbook when I was in grade school. Guess which group attracted the most customers.

Anyways, Americans need to get a grip: Americans are boring. Americans get all excited and act strange when confronted by alternate universes of mores and values. The hard truth is that people who watch Spanish-language television will not tolerate being bored to death by Katie Couric and those snores on CNN and MSNBC.

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