When are we going to stop having to talk about this?
So this week, Kraft Foods and ad agency Cheil Worldwide had to do some damage control when this ad, for “milk’s favourite cookie”, went viral:
The Mommyblogosphere lit up with rumours that this was a print ad designed for the Korean marketplace, but Kraft and Cheil quickly announced that this wasn’t a real ad, only some kind of ‘spec’ ad they created for use at an advertising forum. (To be fair, having worked in agencies, I can totally see how an ad like this would have been trotted out in a limited forum as an example of Creative Thinking. And the Photoshop job on the hand holding the cookie is so amateurish that I can’t imagine that it was ever intended for widespread use.)
Now, I’m no Mayim Bialik when it comes to breastfeeding – I think it’s great if you can do it, but I’m not in the ‘breastfeeding until the kid is 5 years old is your bounden duty as a mother’ camp – but I have to say that what really bugged me about this particular tempest in a teacup is how many websites covered up the ‘nipple’ in the shot, like this:
or even this:
Are we really still implying that a glimpse of some breast and a nipple in a breastfeeding context is somehow controversial?
We’ve seen this nonsense before
In 1992 I spent a month in England, and the big advertising story at the time – which I can’t find online, unfortunately – was a big debate over whether commercials for feminine hygiene products should be shown on ‘family’ channels before the watershed hour (9pm, I think it was). The implication being that 8-year-olds shouldn’t be traumatised (scandalized? confused? freaked out?) by having to recognize that women get their periods.
Just what we need: To raise girls who think that their periods are somehow shameful, and boys who remain clueless about it, as though it’s never anything to do with them.
(It’s bad enough that I was almost 20 years old before I understood that laxatives were to help with bowel movements. All those soft-focus Correctol ads with shots of droplets of water made me think that it was somehow supposed to make you pee more.)
I really think that the sooner we can get over the notion that there’s anything scandalous about breastfeeding (or menstruation, or constipation), the better off we’ll all be.
BONUS OPINION: It’s Oreo’s 100th anniversary this year, and it would not surprise me in the least to discover that this ad had been ‘leaked’ entirely on purpose. It’s given Oreo a huge amount of publicity, and the mommybloggers have been mostly in favour of it – and if you don’t know how powerful mommybloggers are these days, you haven’t been paying attention.