A couple of offensive videos
Two videos today, both eliciting negative reactions of a religious nature.
The first from Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm which has got the Catholic League’s wannabe Irishman Bill Donahue in a righteous lather. In this clip, Larry, who is on meds which make him urinate with great force, visits a Catholic friend (watch 1st 2 minutes):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWsQyoCMIUk[/youtube]
Says Donahue:
Was Larry David always this crude? Would he think it comedic if someone urinated on a picture of his mother? This might be fun to watch, but since HBO only likes to dump on Catholics (it was just a couple of weeks ago that Sarah Silverman insulted Catholics on “Real Time with Bill Maherâ€), and David is Jewish, we’ll never know.
The other vid is an ad for the German lingerie producer, Liaison Dangereuse, in which a woman dons a niqab over her sexy underwear:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOSjKAvyCR8[/youtube]
This prompted a Norwegian religion historian to brand the ad “provoking” because it links the niqab with sexuality, rather than morals and virtue.
Hanne Nabintu Herland does not realise that the niqab has the effect of reducing a human being to a purely sexual object.
If he thinks Sarah Silverman only ‘dumps on Catholics’ he must have very selective viewing indeed…
Ooh, a Catholic suggesting Jews get away with everything because they run the media.
Gosh, that was entirely unexpected.
What next? Tellling us there are Catholic dioceses in the US going bust because Jews run the world’s banks?
Don’t you just love it when religious folk turn into the kind of cartoon stereotypes they like to push about other religious folk?
The niqab has always had links with sexuality…gives me the horn everytime I see one…I thought they all wore lingerie under them.
Curb Your Enthusiasm vid has been taken down. Is it available anywhere else? (It would be good if you could provide some details like the episode name or its place in the series, so that we could look for it ourselves – possibly on DVD.)
Thanks to Stuart for noting the anti-semitism angle. I kinda skimmed that section since the vid didn’t work, so that might well have passed me by otherwise. Bill Donohue’s Catholic League seems desperate to push the completely unsubstantiated myth that Pope Pius helped Jews escape from Germany (and rather less interested in considering the much better substantiated view that the Catholic Church actually helped many of the Nazis such as Mengele to escape).
I think Muslims who wear the nikab normally like to think that wearing it makes them less likely to be viewed as a sex object and thus less likely to receive (to use a crude stereotype) whistles from workmen. Of course, it doesn’t rule them out from being considered attractive and the idea that a woman who wears a nikab can have the option of feeling sexy while protected from prying eyes should certainly not be considered provocative. After all, presumably many woman in the nikab may still want to look good for their husband?