I was at the mall today. In the window of a maternity shop was a poster with a very young looking girl, appearing to be, maybe, 5 months pregnant. She was wearing hip huggers and a belly shirt, thumbs tucked into her back pockets, leaning against a wall, smiling, seductively. The copy read, “Pregnant is HOT!” :eek:
I wasn’t offended by the pregnancy hanging out all over, instead, I was disturbed by its appearance of condoning teen pregnancy, even encouraging it, by making it anonymously sexy. Like saying " Want to meet lots of sexy, new, guys? Well, Get Pregnant!" Am I missing some point? Did they mean , literally? I could buy that… but I’m pretty sure they had another meaning for “Hot” in mind.
Am I just old? Please tell me I am… The alternative is, that I have to stay in the house from now on. I’d get lonely and crazy (er)
It’s an effect, not a cause. Teenage girls are getting pregnant more and more these days so some agencies are going to capitalize on that by targeting them in their ads.
And as a 22 year old, I’d’ve been as surprised as you.
You’re not old, the ad was skanky and if you’d be so kind as to share the name of the establishment which is hyping pregnancy in this utterly unnecessary fashion, I will do my part by boycotting them for perpetuity.
:smack: I can’t remember! It was a maternity shop.
I have to go back to the mall today. so I’ll look and get back to you.
I didn’t think about a boycott. Of course, I have been “boycotting” maternity stores for 30 years!
I’ll take my digital camera. Of course, I’m not sure how I can show them here. I’m too computer impaired to make a web page, even though my service provider gives us one.
I’m not sure it’s so bad. It was in the window of a maternity shop, advertising to their potential customers - who are already pregnant, aren’t all teenagers, and very likely want to feel attractive. I know that when I was pregnant, I didn’t feel attractive - I felt like a beached whale, and the maternity clothes I was able to find only made things worse. If I passed by a store with an ad that made a pregnant woman look sexy and seductive, I would have run right in.
Well, I really feel sorry for the teenagers. Because they’re gonna buy into this and think, “wow, it is hot to be pregnant. I’m gonna get pregnant.” And they’re gonna run out and get pregnant and then wind up with a kid.
A similar thing happened to me from my teenage years.
10 years later they have a kid they don’t want, and fashion will say it is totally unhip to have a kid, so they’ll be uncool 25-year-olds. And people will always look at them funny when they drag out their kid - even in a bar! They will go to light up their kid and people will say, “would you mind smoking your child over there?” And all your clothes will stink, and you’ll generally feel like an outcast. Whenever you see someone standing around outside a building, smoking you automatically feel like you have a special bond with this person because you’re both a part of this rare group of people that smoke children just because of some stupid fashion 10-20 years ago.
There is a website that shows really bad bridesmaids dresses, etc.
There is one picture of a girl going to a dance and she is pregnant. The dress has an opening and her belly is sticking out. Really really awful-looking, in my opinion.
IMHO, the girl in the picture looked like a teenager because a sizeable chunk of models are teenagers, or look like them. That’s the ideal right now, so women who look like that are the ones who get photographed. Also IMHO, our ideals are so skewed that we, as a culture, are losing a realistic concept of what is “normal”. What looks like a 15 year old to someone with a more normal concept of ageing, might look like a 23 year old to someone who reads a lot of fashion magazines and soaks up the Logan’s Run-like atmosphere.
I think that the ad was aimed at women like doreen. The apparent youth of the model was just incidental.
You’re not getting old picunurse, you apparently have some vestige of what used to be called a value system.
Those who are in the biz of hyping their goods to get our dollars will display dead babies on pitchforks if it makes the register ring. Some sharp soul decided that I was the right demographic for a free subscription to Stuff. After paging through it, I concluded that most of the advertisers smoke crack, and anyone who finds that rag to be a source of entertainment has the intellect of a rotting fig.
But pregnancy is hot! What could be more attractive than a healthy glowing woman showing the first signs of her latent earth power to make life. Her body starts expanding, her hair gets thick and glossy, her eyes are brighter, her swelling breasts and nipples can feed and grow life. It’s like she’s a superhero or something!
Seems to me that the targeted demographic is women who are already pregnant and want maternity clothes that aren’t frumpy, concealing, and unattractive. They’re promising their potential customers that you can be pregnant and hot.
That you read it the way you did suggests that the copywriter did a fecking lousy job, but it probably never occurred to them that people might read it as a come-on to get knocked up in order to be fashionable because… erm, because that’s manifestly stupid.
(I’m assiduously ignoring all the extant campaigns that are manifestly stupid, of course. The Seven Deadly Sins to pitch the new Jaguars? Alright! I wanna be an avaricious, road-raging, drunk-driving, fat lazy bastard, too! Where do I sign?)
