> To heck with AIDS, Ads are the biggest problem in the world.

Have you looked at the stats for Africa of late - for AIDS and 
probably for ads as well. I suspect that overall the AIDS is "winning" 
there.

> Look at the
> number of impressions of half naked women vs half naked men that you 
> see
> just passing out of your local grocery store and ask yourself what 
> message
> that gives your daughter? I have nothing against half nakedness (or 
> fully
> clothed...ness... ) but what does my daughter see as her value in 
> the world?
> Is she worth something because she is smart, strong willed (boy, let 
> me tell
> you) and a hard worker? Or does she feel that she is only worth 
> something
> because she is pretty?

We seem to have moved on here to trying to find ways to 
surreptitiously include penile erection in ads. I'm not sure what the 
point is - I would have thought that it largely targets at a minimum 
the sexually informed adult and probably only a subset of them with a 
tendency towards having "dirty minds" to see the hidden suggestions. 
Apparently I'm one such as I seem to see them more than most people. 
These are quite real purposeful inclusions and not 'just' the fevered 
imaginations of a wowserish mind :-). I'm sad that our society must be 
found to be valuing this sort of thing for it to be worth advertising 
men's time doing it. And that the necessary trend in society when such 
things become unprotestable against is towards more but more blatant 
versions of the same. At the moment it's only the aware adults who are 
targeted but the children's time will come. I guess it's a softening 
up exercise.

Over the last month there's been a billboard by a major Auckland 
motorway with a short sentence that every adult is certain is 
referring to a 3 person sex session. That gets well down towards the 
bottom of the teenage years in most cases and below that in too many. 
Once they can do that with about fear of reprisal we are ready for 
explicitly targeting children.

I'd like our society as a whole to make a position statement on such 
things rather than letting things slowly slide into the abyss. I think 
that even very 'free-thinking' people are liable to not really want 
sexual suggestiveness openly displayed on billboards. Maybe I'm wrong.



        Russell McMahon



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