UPDATE: Just to clarify, this billboard is not currently up (as far as I know). One commenter says it’s from the early ’90s; I haven’t been able to verify that. I knew it wasn’t currently up when I wrote this post, but I realized I didn’t explicitly say that. Sorry for any confusion, or for your disappointment if you’ve been driving around Kansas City hoping to see it.
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Timothy H. sent in this billboard (found here), which advertises…actually, I’m not sure because I can’t read the small print in the left corner (I read online somewhere that this billboard was displayed in Kansas City, and I think the second line says “The Kansas City [something] Health Department”). I guess the message was that in order to have a good future you need to be abstinent?
Looking around online, I think most people are taking it to mean “engineers don’t get to have sex,” but I think the message is “if you want to get an education to get a good job, you better not be having sex ’cause it’ll ruin all your plans.” Might be interesting for a discussion of how teen (if that’s what he’s supposed to be) sex is portrayed, often as having immediate and irrevocable negative effects that preclude any type of future…though young people having sex often aren’t provided with the resources (sex education, access to birth control) that would help prevent the negative effects that sexual activity can cause.
Or you could use it in a discussion of public service announcements gone awry. I have a feeling this billboard probably kept more kids from becoming engineers than sex ever did.
And just for the record, and not to deny the difficulties that can arise from teen (or adult, for that matter) sexual activity, my mom encountered one of those difficulties at age 16–namely, finding out I was gonna be making an entrance into the world–and did go on, as far as I can tell, to have a future, with an education and career and everything!
Thanks, Timothy!
13 Comments
I’m surprised they didn’t use ’sociologist’ instead of ‘engineer’.
What I love about these campaigns is how they believe they can convince kids of stuff that flies in the face of everything they see around them, meaning that they see people around them having sex (well, they don’t SEE them having sex, but they know they do), and they can bloody well see that nobody’s appendages are falling off because of that.
I like how the connection to pregnancy is completely eliminated here: it’s not that getting (someone) pregnant is the problem: sex is the problem! Sex itself ruins your future.
They can do that, you see, because kids these days, them’s are really dumb.
These sort of all-or-nothing ideas are really common in education.
From my sex-ed the message seemed to be that if you have sex you’ll get HIV and herpes and you or your partner will get pregnant.
Eventually that scare wears off and students are left with very little good information.
At what point does the guy in the billboard get to have sex? If he waits until after he gets his degree he can still get someone pregnant. Or if he gets married he still might not want to have kids right away.
I find the contrast with those French sex-safety posters really interesting.
It’s all or nothing baby! In America, we teach kids that there isn’t any gray area in life. Yes everything is black and white, life or death, etc etc etc. And when you only have two choices, then there’s not much need to think. Cuz we sure as hell don’t want our kids being able to think. That would be dangerous to the establishment!
Why not study the engineering of sex toys? Then it’s a win-win…
My brother is an engineer, and he had sex once before he got his degree, yet somehow he completed his education. Frankly, I think not having sex is more distracting to someone’s career path than going for it since at least they won’t be spending all their time thinking about sex and getting neurotic about the big myth that “everyone’s doing it except me.”
maybe I’ve just been watching too much Arrested Development (which put quite a fine point on the stereotype in the recurring “It ain’t easy being white/it ain’t easy being black” parody), but the first thing I thought it was saying was “hey, you black kids, don’t get girls pregnant and ruin your future.” ‘Cause THAT’s helpful.
definitely billboard FAIL.
Guys, this picture is from the early 90s… why is it making the blog rounds now? It’s shows up frequently in facebook groups since 2004.
If I can’t trust you to prevent a pregnancy, how can I trust you to build a bridge?
Matt–we put up things people send us that we think are sociologically interesting. Often they’re up-to-the-moment, but older stuff is useful too. And we put it up now because…well, now is when someone sent it in. It definitely has an early-90s look about it, though.
Not only is the billboard from the 90’s, this picture of it could be found on the internet in the 90’s.
For the life of me, I can’t think of a good reason why anyone would blog about this in 2008.
Again…things that are old can still be useful teaching tools, and my comments about the way sex is portrayed here apply just as well even though it didn’t just appear. We post old cartoons, vintage military STD posters, etc., because they can be used to illustrate ideas we might talk about in class (efforts to keep teens from having sex). It doesn’t particularly matter that it’s old, and in fact that could be useful for showing how messages about teen sexuality have (or haven’t) changed.
Just to add, I’ve seen this billboard up on the outskirts of Baltimore as recently as May.
Left corner:
“The Kansas City Municipal Health Department
and Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services”
and have you seen their funny logo of an exemplary engineer’s private parts?
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[...] Source: http://contexts.org/socimages/2008/08/12/i-want-to-be-an-engineersex-can-wait-encouraging-abstinence... [...]
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[...] Over at Foreign Policy’s blog, I came across this image of a billboard from the early ’90s: [...]