Beyonce at the Super Bowl

I feel the need, as I often do, to soften my opinions with a few nice disclaimers before I begin: Beyonce is an incredibly talented and beautiful woman, and I'm sure she has a lot of other wonderful characteristics that I could point out if I knew her better.

But I strongly disapprove of her Super Bowl performance. And it has saddened me to see how many women raved about it. I wish they could see what I see.

Today I came across this article on Facebook entitled "A Dance of Power, Not Sex". Just in case you don't want to read it, it talks about the lack of male influence in Beyonce's show, both on the level of the dancers as well as on the level of production. Which is a great point......I guess? Score one for Beyonce that she didn't have half naked men grinding up against her in her show. But the article also claims that this is what normal people saw from that show, and that anyone who noticed the super skimpy clothing and provocative movements only noticed that because they had a dirty mind to begin with. I find that insulting. So the only reason I am an advocate for modesty and have such concern for the young women of America is because I have a dirty mind? I think not.

Do you think the young girls of America saw power and female independence? I doubt it. Or even if they did, I think they could hardly escape another message, that is far too frequent already: that showing more skin goes hand in hand with being more popular and even more successful. And I don't think they saw that because they are bad people, I think they saw that because society has trained them to see that.

Then there's the issue of objectifying women. The article above claims that those of us with dirty minds saw too much sexiness because we objectify women. Immodesty inevitably leads to objectifying women. Don't believe me? Check out this article from cracked.com that lists several ways that dressing sexy degrades women, one of which is that even women objectify women. The "Defiant Dance" article even talked about examples of women objectifying Beyonce, although the article missed the point that this was a bad thing. It quoted women's reaction to the half-time show along the lines of "I want her figure". This kills me. I wish so terribly that America had more truly strong and independent female role models that could inspire us to greater goals than merely having a body different from the one we already have. We have far too many "role models" that do that to us already.

And, maybe more importantly, the world needs more strong women like my mom, who are willing to speak out against the inappropriate whenever it rears its ugly head.