As I approach 40 in the next few years, I am reminded of something I learned during my teen and early twenty years, how out of touch older adults are to popular culture. In another lifetime, I used to have a period column during my days in undergraduate school, devoted to such topics.
I always swore that I would never make the same mistakes and I always admired the adults that could still relate to younger people. I bring this up in light of watching Bristol Palin’s rather awkward pitch for abstinence alongside Mike Sorrentino, who is himself a bit of an icon on MTV’s reality show, “Jersey Shore.”
Bristol Palin, the 20-year-old now-single mother, rebuffs his advances and the two have a discussion about sex and abstinence, the importance of safe sex, and of course, the importance of abstinence.
From any kind of effectiveness level, the effort is an embarrassment. The dialogue is steeped with fake colloquialism that tries to convey hip and contemporary jargon, but mostly comes across as a string of cheesy one-liners and contrived banters. They close with what is apparently the organization’s slogan, “pause before you play.”
You can watch it for yourself:
The spot is more likely to inspire jeers and Saturday Night Live potshots than have any impact on teen’s sex habits. To be frank, such references would have been played out when I was 20. The idea that this spot would impact the thinking of any hormone-driven youth is ludicrous.
Not that this is a new thing. There have been other comical attempts at reaching youth. Who could forget The Partnership for a Drug Free America and their ad with the egg in the frying pan commercial where the man holds up the egg and says, “this is your brain.” Next he points to the pan, “this is drugs.” Finally he cracks it onto the hot frying pan and as it sizzles away he says, “This is your brain on drugs, any questions?”
My question was at the time, how dumb are you guys, thinking that is going to work?
In the 1980s when I was in high school, they launched into the “just say no” campaign to teach kids not to use drugs. I remember our school used to do what they called, “Red Ribbon Week,” and the slogan was “See Red, Say No.”
Of course, it was a strange ploy anyway since officially our high school did not have a drug problem. But then if you scratched beneath that veneer you might have found something very different. I will never forget as a freshman walking out with my red ribbon on my shirt into the parking lot, and seeing some kids with their red ribbons smoking joints.
Just say no was something we laughed at and mocked. The tone deafness of the public figures, thinking they had any clue as to how to reach impressionable youth.
This of course led to more sophisticated anti-drug efforts such as DARE, which was another one of my pet-peeves. This follows well my commentary on court practices failing to test their assumptions before admitting into evidence untested claims of experts.
DARE was an abysmal failure. Do not just take my word for it, the General Accounting Office in 2003 finally put an end to the misery of millions of kids with a report that showed what most had known for a long time – DARE did not work.
The GAO report found that “In brief, the six long-term evaluations of the DARE elementary school curriculum that we reviewed found no significant differences in illicit drug use between students who received DARE in the fifth or sixth grade (the intervention group) and students who did not (the control group). Three of the evaluations reported that the control groups of students were provided other drug use prevention education.”
It continued, “All of the evaluations suggested that DARE had no statistically significant long-term effect on preventing youth illicit drug use. Of the six evaluations we reviewed, five also reported on students’ attitudes toward illicit drug use and resistance to peer pressure and found no significant differences between the intervention and control groups over the long term. Two of these evaluations found that the DARE students showed stronger negative attitudes about illicit drug use and improved social skills about illicit drug use about 1 year after receiving the program. These positive effects diminished over time.”
From 1983 to 2003, DARE operated in 80 percent of all school districts across the US and also in some foreign countries. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, on a program that the GAO said did not work.
Tone deafness has a very serious component to it, and when public officials do not design programs with a healthy perspective on youth and good research to back it up, money is wasted on ineffective programs.
Apparently, groups have not learned that these things do not work. They get mocked. Bristol Palin is probably not the person to reach impressionable youth anyway. But if she were, the skit in the ad is not the way to go about doing it.
It is horribly written and laced with cliches, and no one is going to take it seriously. Do they focus-group this stuff? Everyone is making fun of it.
Speaking of pop culture, former President George W. Bush has a book out that he is soon going to wish he never released. There is all sorts of material in the book that will be mined over by media looking for their kicks, and President Bush provides them with much ready-made material.
In the book, President Bush claims that the lowest moment of his presidency was when Kanye West, a rapper and singer, called him a racist and said in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that “Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
Let us just recount a few things that happened during Bush’s presidency. He had the attacks on 9/11, which was one of the lowest moments in American history and many people’s lives. We had the revelations that weapons of mass destruction, the backbone of his war in Iraq strategy, did not exist or at least did not exist in any kind of quantity that made Iraq an imminent threat and justified preemptive war. We had Hurricane Katrina, where an American city was devastated and the government’s response was stunning incompetence. We had revelations of Abu Ghraib, where photos were shown of US soldiers mocking, if not torturing, Iraqi POWs. We had the collapse of the US Financial Markets and almost the entirety of the developed world. I could actually go on from there.
But for Mr. Bush, the low point was when a rapper gave him a personal slight? Are you kidding me? We used to criticize him for being shallow and self-absorbed, but this really takes the cake.
Bush told Matt Lauer on NBC, “I resent it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments of my presidency.”
Bush writes that he can barely think about the moment “without feeling disgust” and that it outranks people criticizing him for the war in Iraq or his efforts to cut taxes to benefit the rich.
This response really embodies the problem here – President Bush ranks his worst moments those of criticism – something that comes with the job.
Matt Lauer pushed the former President, telling him that he will take heat for saying the worst moment was not watching the misery in Louisiana caused by the hurricane and the ineffective government response, but rather because someone insulted him.
“The misery in Louisiana affected me deeply as well,” Bush told Lauer. “There’s a lot of tough moments in the book. And it was a disgusting moment, pure and simple.”
Because, of course, Kanye West is important enough to be able to cause the President’ worst moment.
Moreover, Kanye West was saying what millions of blacks in this country were thinking, that if this had been a bunch of white people on the roofs of buildings waiting to be rescued, the government would have moved much more quickly. Not saying they were right about this, only that this was the thinking.
I find it amazing, on a consistent basis, how myopic, thin-skinned and petty people are who are in public office. Criticism and even insults come with the territory. If you cannot handle it, perhaps you are not fit for public office.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
David:
This posting seems a bit off-message for a local blog. You start with a commentary on youth culture and Bristol Palin and end with a diatribe against Bush (not my favorite president either) but you don’t relate any of this to local politics.
The strength of this blog is that you focus on local issues and (hopefully) bring people together who may have differing views on national issues. For example, on zipcar there was widespread agreement among people on this blog who identify themselves as conservative, liberal, democrat, republican, whatever.
My concern is that these blogs may simply divide people.
There is plenty to talk about locally (e.g. Trader Joe’s was packed yesterday at 9:20 and 6 registers were open and busy–no other supermarket in town has that business at that hour).
I guess we should permit you some indulgences since you do all this for little or no money, but I hope we get back to local issues or State/local issues.
It’s a very effective ad simply because people are talking about it. In that sense, it is a marketer’s dream — they are trading on the celebrity of the actors to disseminate a simple message: use condoms. Jon Stewart ran the ad in full. You are talking about it on a political blog. Type “Bristol Palin safe sex ad” in Google and you get About 513,000,000 results. As of this moment 558,181 have watched the original on YouTube.
Rod Blagojevich is advertising pistachios. Does that make you go out and buy pistachios? No. But you remember the ad, and the kernel of thought has been planted in your brain. That’s the point.
I find it amazing, on a consistent basis, how myopic, thin-skinned and petty people are who are in public office. Criticism and even insults come with the territory. If you cannot handle it, perhaps you are not fit for public office”
I agree, the guy in the White House right now with his continual crying about Fox is probably the most thin-skinned president that ever served.
Dr. Wu raises a good point. I too am curious about the impact of TJ’s now that it is finally here. The market on Lake Blvd has been open about a year now, how is it doing?
Ad campaigns targeted at youth like that seem mainly to provide some political cover that certain elected officials are really doing something about a social problem. It’s an easy message.
The problem is that disaffected teens will probably go out of their way to mock and defy establishment authority messages. I can appreciate putting out the message that you really should avoid drugs, unprotected sex (and yes, avoiding sex altogether would be safer). But I think a more effective strategy would be to work as a community to establish an environment with enough constructive activities accessible to all so as to keep teens occupied and not give them time to consider negative alternatives — sports, music, scouting, religious communities, school/community theater, school clubs, etc.
“New music always sounds loud to old ears.” Pythagoras, mathematician, musician and pre-Socratic philosopher c. 570-495 BCE.
Let’s see, according to your article:
~anti-drug campaigns are “abysmal failures” (So let’s say yes to drugs?)
~abstinence only campaigns are “cheesy” (So let’s say yes to teen sex?)
~gov’t wastes money on “ineffective programs” (So gov’t is ineffective?)
~Bush’s feelings are “shallow and self-absorbed” (So he’s not entitled to his own feelings?)
~politicians are “myopic, thin-skinned and petty” (All of them?)
Hmmmmmmmmm – Did you get up on the wrong side of bed this morning?
[i]”Ad campaigns targeted at youth like that seem mainly to provide some political cover that certain elected officials are really doing something about a social problem. It’s an easy message. The problem is that disaffected teens will probably go out of their way to mock and defy establishment authority messages.”[/i]
Yet some propaganda works*.
If the message is abstinence from sexual intercourse, I think the best hope would be for the message to be delivered by a peer who paid a heavy price for having sex, maybe a teen who got pregnant and feels her youth was stolen from her or another teen who got a serious STD or a boy who has to work just to pay child support.
After trying to scare kids straight about the riskes of intercourse, I think it’s also important to teach the benefits of contraception. I recall when Dr. Elders, the Surgeon General, decided that masturbation should be tought in school and she was shouted down (or laughed at). I’m not sure it really needs to be taught. However, I think, in place of intercourse or vasocongestion, it ought to be encouraged.
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*The anti-smoking message got through loud and clear to my generation. I’m 46 and I don’t have any friends near my age who smoke cigarettes or use other tobacco products habitually. I presume that part of the reason my generation generally does not smoke as much as the generations which came before mine were the anti-tobacco campaigns. (Seeing my own father, a chain smoker, die at age 52, when I was 7 years old, helped in my case, too.)
I always swore that I would never make the same mistakes and I always admired the adults that could still relate to younger people. I bring this up in light of watching Bristol Palin’s rather awkward pitch for abstinence alongside Mike Sorrentino, who is himself a bit of an icon on MTV’s reality show, “Jersey Shore.”
From any kind of effectiveness level, the effort is an embarrassment. The dialogue is steeped with fake colloquialism that tries to convey hip and contemporary jargon, but mostly comes across as a string of cheesy one-liners and contrived banters. They close with what is apparently the organization’s slogan, “pause before you play.”
LOL – you as a near-40 year old, who swore to remember never to make the mistakes of those tone deaf adults of your youth, are now critiquing a 20 somethings message to teenagers about the dangers of sex. What do you think the difference is between your critique and those others you so vividly remember from your younger days? I submit, that the only difference is age and time.
Thanks for a great laugh.
“Moreover, Kanye West was saying what millions of blacks in this country were thinking”
I find it interesting that you, who are not black, can pretend to know millions of blacks in this country were thinking.
The anti-smoking message got through loud and clear to my generation. I’m 46 and I don’t have any friends near my age who smoke cigarettes or use other tobacco products habitually.
Rich, I take your point, and it is a good example. But maybe it’s important to lay out a little context on the issue of smoking.
Smoking used to be far more acceptable to the general population. Ad campaigns were directed at the broad general population to make smoking less acceptable. Safe sex and avoiding drugs are generally embraced by the larger population and the ad campaign is directed toward youth to get them to buy in.
I suspect that it will always be a greater challenge to get youth to accept such messages in desirably broad numbers. Problem is that the pre-frontal cortex (or wherever the decision-making part of the brain is) often isn’t fully developed until age 25.
wdf1: “I suspect that it will always be a greater challenge to get youth to accept such messages in desirably broad numbers. Problem is that the pre-frontal cortex (or wherever the decision-making part of the brain is) often isn’t fully developed until age 25.”
LOL – good point! Teens always think they know much more than adults do! Then they grow up, have kids themselves, and cringe at the know-it-all attitude of modern youth! Was it ever thus…
several black people have told me that Kanye West’s comments are exactly what David said, that they think millions of black people were thinkning that way. One person also told me that they have gotten so many warnings in the past and that could have effected people, not to mention that some people just cant get out.
I agree that this post is a bit meandering and quite off topic for a “local” blog, but I think that it’s good to follow tangents every once in a while. I think they lead to interesting discussions that likely wouldn’t occur otherwise.
Unfortunately, there is a topic in this post, Hurricane Katrina, which is being treated as a weapon in political discourse by some who clearly do not have the facts. I’m also saddened that many lack respect for the seriousness of the aftermath, though I concede I’m overly sensitive to the topic.
I’m all for reading about actual accounts or first person reports, but please respect those of us who endured the fallout of Hurricane Katrina by not fanning the political flames through spreading conjecture and misinformation.