Ushering in public lewdness

www.americanthinker.com

At a recent concert, Usher got rebuffed by a woman he’d brought onstage to simulate a sex act with. You might think he’d be condemned for pressing on with what was essentially foreplay despite her visible discomfort. Instead, he came off as the sympathetic party — and she became the punchline. This isn’t an argument against free speech; it’s an argument for what audiences are now willing to tolerate.

During his “R&B Tour” stop with Chris Brown at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium on Saturday, Usher pulled a fan from the crowd for his signature onstage seduction routine during “Can U Handle It?” The fan, later identified as 24-year-old nurse Gabrielle Cheyenne, was brought up to an onstage prop bed where a shirtless Usher gyrated his hips suggestively as he serenaded her.

Cheyenne looked visibly uncomfortable as Usher continued to sing to her and interact with her, and when he tried to get her to recline on the onstage bed, she stiffly moved back, and the singer pulled away. He told the crowd, “I don’t think she want to be on the stage, huh?” — then waved her away as boos rose from the crowd.

Rather than any reflection on the spectacle itself, the backlash online fell almost entirely on the fan — accused of being a buzzkill for not playing along with a simulated-sex routine performed in front of thousands. Cheyenne fired back on social media, insisting “NOBODY is declining to go on stage” once chosen, and has spent the days since posting selfies captioned “Unbothered” rather than apologizing for having boundaries.

Clearly, Cheyenne is no prude. She got up on the stage willingly, in front of thousands of strangers, knowing full well what Usher’s routine involves. But this was too much for her, and she said so with her body if not her words. Usher being a sexy celebrity couldn’t make her compromise. Neither could the pressure of being publicly on display, where fan peer pressure could easily have kicked in and pushed a less grounded woman to just go along with it. She didn’t. And for that, she got booed.

It’s worth remembering what used to get a performer in trouble for indecency. The fact that Usher’s antics are not just tolerated but defended in today’s culture stands in sharp contrast to comedian Lenny Bruce’s legal troubles in the 1960s for merely using obscene language in his act. Bruce was arrested, blacklisted, and effectively hounded to an early grave for words. Usher gyrates on top of a woman who is visibly recoiling, and the crowd boos her.

I’ve been here before. We recently discovered an old device I bought in the 1990s called Curse-Free TV. You ran your cable signal through it, and when you turned it on, it read the Closed Captioning to find any naughty words. It would then mute the sound and, if you wanted, would pop up an alternative caption that removed the cuss words, or replaced them with less-offensive alternatives.

I wanted to hook it up to my current TV to see if it still works, but alas, the cables are obsolete, and the picture would be degraded to standard definition.

Perhaps that’s fitting. In a culture too crude for even a soft mute button, becoming obsolete might be the only dignified option left.