So February is the Superbowl month, something I found out as I killed time in the airport lounges of Bangkok, Riyadh and Cairo recently in a hectic schedule of back to back lecture invitations. It is one of those facets of American life that, thanks to Janet Jackson, we now have a better understanding of.

The superbowl fanfare reported widely in the media brought to mind how, many of us unfamiliar with America's mass culture, read with uncomprehending bemusement that the American public could be so scandalised by Ms Jackson's exposure of one of her breasts live on television at last year's event. She blamed that on wardrobe malfunction and her male co-entertainer tried hard to sound flustered with embarrassment.

It got us wondering that America, the most modern society on earth and the beacon of democracy and freedom, where near nudity in mainstream entertainment is thought to be part of all that notion of liberty, and pornography is a legitimate billion-dollar industry, why such fuss over the exposure of one breast and an accidental one at that?

Supposing that Americans did not buy Ms Jackson's excuse, is she as ignorant as many of us to have overestimated the American public's liberalism (read libertinism) and mature self-control? And it was not America's sudden prudish moment of moral puritanism as the media blitz on the court trial of her more famous brother demonstrates. So, us nave ignorant ones now know that even in America there are still lines that should not be crossed in matters of morality and decency, even when there are no victims.