[On October 16,
1916, Margaret
Sanger opened her first birth control clinic in New York City. So this
week, on the 100th anniversary of that moment, I’ll AmericanStudy
Sanger and other histories and images connected to this still-controversial
subject, leading up a special weekend post highlighting a great scholarly book
on the topic!]
Three telling
stages in the history of advertising birth control.
1)
Protect
the Troops: About a third of the way down that Daily Mail article from February 2013 are two very distinct images
serving a very similar purpose: asking soldiers serving in a wartime theater to
use condoms. The World War I image starkly pitches “Dough-Boy Prophylactic,”
using only its active ingredients and its grim purpose (“For the Prevention of
Syphilis & Gonorrhea”); the World War II ad uses seemingly every trick in
the advertising book, from colors and a cute condom mascot (who proclaims “It’s
still a blast”) to a graph (“The PLEASURE GRAPH,” natch) and a striking central
quote (“I take one everywhere I take
my PENIS!!,” proclaims the soldier on whom the ad focuses) to very raunchy
humor (“WARNING! Objects in condoms may appear larger than they actually are!!”),
to sell its product. Clearly over this 25-year period advertising and marketing
had significantly evolved, but so too had the image of condoms, from a medical
necessity to a source of excitement and pleasure.
2)
A 1975 Controversy: Throughout the 1960s and
70s, the National
Association of Broadcasters (NAB) prohibited condom commercials from airing
on television. That prohibition was not lifted until a 1979
Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against broadcast networks (and for
more than a decade after that condom commercials were still nonexistent on
network television), but in 1975 one network, KNTV in San Jose, decided to run
a Trojan commercial
nevertheless. That commercial was hugely controversial and quickly pulled from
the network, but what’s striking to this AmericanStudier is the opposite: how
much the ad taps into conservative narratives of morality (opening with a quote
from Ecclesiastes!) and family (making “responsible parenting” the chief goal
of condom use) in order to make condoms as nonthreatening and traditional as
possible (the ad also emphasizes Trojan’s half-century of existence). Condoms
couldn’t help but become part
of the decade’s debates over abortion, sex, and morality, but this ad
locates them very differently in those debates than we might expect.
3)
Banned Ads: I don’t watch a lot of live
television other than sporting events, but I can’t remember the last time I saw
a condom ad on TV (whereas seemingly every third ad during sports broadcasts is
for medication to treat erectile disfunction). On the other hand, if and when programs or compilations of banned
commercials appear, condom ads are far and away the kinds of commercials
most frequently included in that category. It stands to reason that condom ads
would veer into a level of sexiness that would make network executives cringe,
although to be honest there was far more sex in an average episode of Two and a Half Men then in any of the
commercials on those lists. Which, when coupled with the fact that the highly
non-sexual 1975 Trojan ad was likewise pulled off the air, makes clear that it’s
not so much the content of the ads that leads to these concerns and responses.
Instead, I would argue that condoms specifically, like birth control more
generally, connect directly to narratives of sexuality with which many
Americans remain profoundly uncomfortably and with which as a community we
still struggle to engage.
Last post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories or images you’d highlight?
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