Have you seen the commercial for the birth control pill ORTHO TRI-CYCLEN LO. (If not, you can watch it here.)
The commercial depicts beautifully lit, attractive women walking around pretty settings in slow motion. Underneath the narration about the pill’s effects and side-effects, a pixie woman sings a the main hook from “There She Goes” (originally by The La’s.)
“There she goes. There she goes again.”
The song and the visuals artfully deliver a clear, pro-woman, pro-sex message (“There she goes, having premarital sex and not getting pregnant. Hey, check it out, there she goes again!), but in a way that slides past the literal-minded Virginity Cultists who’d bury the FCC under a mountain of auto-generated e-mails if a commercial spokesperson stood in front of a camera and said, “Hey, young women, this drug makes sex more fun and less risky.”
Maybe this commercial is a glimpse at the potential upside of the ascendant Christian Conservative movement’s censorship movement. To get messages out, creative people are going to have to be more artful. Maybe the crackdown on so-called broadcast indecency is, as we speak, birthing a dozen new Cole Porters. We can only hope.