About one week ago, Jesse Watters from the Fox News channel’s O’Reilly Factor came to campus to interview students about Brown’s second annual Nudity Week. Nudity Week is a series of events that explores and discusses the naked body, body image, and stereotypes surrounding the concept of nudity. The link to Fox’s coverage can be found here:
http://nation.foxnews.com/2013/10/09/watters-world-takes-brown-university’s-nudity-week
Based on this video, it is clear that Watters doesn’t quite understand, or didn’t want to bother to properly investigate, Nudity Week. He advertises it as a campus-wide public nudity extravaganza, while it is actually something quite different. These events are not public, and those who attend can be as naked or clothed as they choose. These are small events that create a safe space for students to understand and explore their emotional reaction to the naked body and promote introspection of the term “beauty.”
If you check out the link above, look to the right of the video. At the right hand side of the screen is a mission statement for the Fox Nation organization; they claim, “The Fox Nation is for those opposed to intolerance, excessive government control of our lives, and attempts to monopolize opinion or suppress freedom of thought, expression, and worship.” Although Watters and O’Reilly don’t completely disagree with nudity week, they “have a laugh at [Brown’s] expense.” Obviously they don’t realize that by laughing at us they are doing just what they purport to disagree with in the mission statement mentioned above. Disregarding the lack of cohesion between their speech and mission statement, I think it is interesting to explore why a journalistic station would misreport or just spend so much time making fun of college students when there are far more important problems to deal with.
Watters’ joke that he would like to be involved in Nudity Week, and other somewhat sexual comments, are pretty creepy, but I think what is important here is Watters and O’Reilly’s needs to assert dominance over a group of college students. They target us because it’s easy to misreport and make what we do seem silly. The fact is that this is a display of pure insecurity. Everyday people exaggerate stories to paint themselves in a different light than the true story would illuminate. I have always felt that dealing with insecurity by putting others down or asserting dominance is the least courageous manner of doing so. Here, their mission statement is altered to “we are opposed to intolerance or the suppression of freedom of thought unless this intolerance and suppression makes us look good to the public who knows nothing about what we’re reporting on and makes us feel better about ourselves.” Clearly, this is not what they mean to have viewers perceive. Nudity Week is an opportunity to explore insecurity and develop appropriate ways of dealing with it. Perhaps (if it weren’t totally creepy) Watters and O’Reilly would benefit from taking part in Nudity Week.