Growing up in northern West Virginia, I found most of my big-ticket entertainment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I enjoyed Pirates and Steelers games with my grandparents, and my parents took us to the symphony, Buhl Planetarium and the zoo. With my best childhood friend, I rode a bumper-float behind her parents' speedboat at the intersection of the Three Rivers and attended my first concert: Billy Joel. As fondly as all of these memories, I recall surviving my early teen angst by tuning into B-94 FM. Ahhh, those were different years.
These memories came flooding back to me during our recent Vermont vacation, as I had some alone time in our rented Grand Marquis (Style? We haz it.) and decided to turn on some tunes at 2:30 on a lovely Friday afternoon. Finding a station with old-skool hair-band music wasn't hard, as I picked up the car in New Hampshire. After listening to "Nothin' but a Good Time" my jaw hit the very large floorboard as a Trojan condom ad came on. Did I mention that this was 2:30 in the afternoon?
Aghast as I was, though, I realized that this fairly graphic ad would not have been played during "family hours" back in my day. Instead, those were the days of Spuds Macenzie and cigarette ads. I'm not sure if a mid-day Trojan ad means that sex is no longer taboo, just as I'm not sure that the absence of cigarette and beer ads mid-day means that those addictions are either taboo or under control enough not to warrant ads anymore. I can't read too much into these ad placements in their vastly different times, as I never studied marketing (and never will -- yawn).
What I am a scholar of, though, is parenting. While my parents never turned on B94 in our car (just not their kind of music), my best friend's very Catholic mother always had it blaring for us. I wonder if she still listens to it, and if B94 is playing similar ads. In my car these days, we listen to an I-pod; but, for a few seconds in my "cop car" in New Hampshire, I thought to myself that my kids are missing out on enjoying the radio. I take that back. Maybe it makes me an old biddy to want to avoid questions about condoms and sex from my very-perceptive eight year-old before it's time. 2:30 on a Friday afternoon, in a car, prompted by the radio, will never be the right time for me. So, alas, they'll miss out on the radio, and on the radio ads, at least until they're having their own teen angst and figure out that they can tune in. By then, they'll know what a condom is anyway, as the Guv and I will have taught them even if the schools haven't. Yet I can't help feeling that a Trojan ad, played mid-day, means a loss of innocence in our society that I damn sure feel should still be there. Then again, the song lyrics they'd be hearing aren't exactly clean either. At least I control what's on my daughter's I-pod, for now anyway. (As for what she hears at school... well, I'm probably silly to be worried about a radio ad! But that's a subject for another post...)
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