When Pigs Fly

By Guest Blogger Claudine Zap

So, you’ve probably heard about the Trojan ad with the pigs in a bar. You may not have seen it, since CBS and Fox are still refusing to give pigs the time of day, or night, on their networks. Why? The networks that pimp shows like The O.C. and Temptation Island won’t air an ad that stresses condom use for pregnancy prevention instead of “health-related uses.” CBS called the ad “inappropriate.” (Ads for Viagra are fine, of course. And condom sales lag far behind drugs for erectile dysfunction)

How about this for inappropriate: according to Trojan, only one in four sex acts involves a condom, a statistic that rates lower than some developing countries. As Planned Parenthood points out, using a condom obviously does prevent both unplanned pregnancies and STDs.

While Fox does have problems with condoms, they don’t seem to have a problem with pigs: Matt Groening recently told Jon Stewart that in his forthcoming The Simpsons Movie, Homer falls in love with a pig. And The Simpsons have had their run-ins with Fox management before: as Jenn Pozner writes, they were ordered by Fox to never put a fake Fox news crawl on any future episodes after running one that Fox was sure would be mistaken for actual news.

So my pitch to my favorite cartoon sit-com family is this: please air a condom ad on an upcoming episode. It could have pigs! It could have Rupert Murdoch! It would be funny. And finally, it would succeed where Trojan couldn’t: it would get condoms on the Fox network.

Guest Blogger Claudine Zap blogs at DameNation.blogspot.com, and is working on a book: Whatever Happened to the Feminine Mystique?

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Advertising, American Culture, Commercialism, Feminism, Health & Sexuality, Pop Culture, Reproductive Justice, Issues in the News, Public Relations, Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.