I cannot read the bottom text by following the link. I hope it has something to do with advocating real sex education, though.

It took me a minute to even realize what it was a picture of, and even then it struck me as more bizarre than disturbing. I may not be the target audience, anyway.

They both just look very distopian sci-fi to me, not necessarily repellent. But, again, that's my brain and I'm not an inner-city teenager.

Personally, I hate it. I see what they're trying to say, but if I was a pregnant teenager looking at that, it would probably make me feel even more isolated and conspicuous than I already did.

I don't like it at all, because the implications, as I see it, are weird and not helpful. Those being:

1. It's disturbing for teenaged boys to be pregnant, and it's more automatically disturbing to imagine consequences following teenage sex for boys than for girls

2. Teenage pregnancy is automatically disturbing.

3. Teenage pregnancy has "real" consequences for girls, but not for boys, but we should pretend there are consequences for boys - about whom we're naturally more disturbed when things go wrong - to help the girls out anyway.

The campaign just seems so strange to me. But what really bugs me, I guess, is this underlying idea that you have to appeal to sympathy for men in order to get anything done that will help women.

The text at the bottom reads:

Milwaukee has one of the highest teen birth rates in America, and it's a burden the rest of us end up carrying, through higher taxes for healthcare, education and other services teen mothers can't afford. So get beyond disturbed. Get involved at onemilwaukee.org

I wasn't too crazy about the ad before reading that, and now I definitely don’t like it.

All it is doing is promoting the myth of scarcity -- there aren't enough resources to go around! Irresponsible youth having sex are stealing resources from those who deserve! We shouldn’t be responsible for social programs abused by irresponsible teens! Etc.

I hate it. To me its saying "put all the blame on the girl" and that its ok to treat pregnant teenagers like crap because its "disturbing." I'm sure they had good intentions but I am just so sick of the woman/girl always getting all the blame (i.e. Jamie Lynn needs to "keep her legs closed"). Um hello, those eggs didn't fertilize themselves!

I moved from Milwaukee to the Bay Area about six months ago. When the ads started popping up, I was pretty confused as to what they were advocating. Finally, when I realized they were teenage pregancy awareness ads, I didn't quite understand how they would be effective. I get what they're trying to say, but the boys don't even really look pregnant - just mostly defiant and angry, with bloated bellies.

A more convincing teen pregancy ad were the billboards around town, in Spanish and English, that had a picture of a girl with the words, "Wanna have a good time? Call XXX-XXXX." I was interested and called the number, and it was a recording of a girl trying to be seductive. A baby starting crying in the background, and it grew stonger. The girl started complaining about having a baby while in high school and then asked, "Do you still want to have fun?"

I thought that ad was a lot more effective, due to the interactiveness of it, and to reiterate Maggie's comment, it didn't involve dystopian-sci-fi looking boys.

I assumed the goal is to get the attention of people who live in communities where teen pregnancy is so common that people take it for granted. To say "hey, boys being pregnant isn't normal, and we should work towards a time when teenage girls being pregnant isn't either."

I don't think it demonizes pregnant teen girls, or says that consequences of sex would matter more if they fell harder on boys. I think it just says "Stop taking this for granted, get off your ass and do something about the problem."

But I agree with others who say the boys don't really look pregnant (though this may be just because we're not used to seeign pregnant boys)--It would be a lot more powerful if the boy was in profile.

Yeah I think the intentions are probably good but the wording is very odd.

K-Fed let himself go! Damn!

I like the image, but I don't think it's utilized effectively. I agree that this is more likely to serve as an excuse to demonize teen girls, rather than to support them. If they changed the words to something like "You should be just as concerned when it's a girl" or "Why don't we care about this when it's a girl?" To me, those sorts of messages put the responsibility on the viewer, rightfully, as, presumably, the viewer is a registered voter and taxpayer who has some amount of say in what their local schools and governments do. But saying "this is disturbing" leaves plenty of room to heap blame on the girl instead.

I almost LIKE the ad. I say "almost" because sadly, I'm not really viscerally affected by the photo. It is weird and very sci-fi. But I like it because I feel it's along the same lines as the bumper sticker "if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." I feel that it draws attention to the public's tendency to sympathize more with boys "in trouble" than girls. I hate that they use the word "disturbing"... I wish the ad was a little more compassionate. It's like the message is weird and confusing because it's not complete.

I almost LIKE the ad. I say "almost" because sadly, I'm not really viscerally affected by the photo. It is weird and very sci-fi. But I like it because I feel it's along the same lines as the bumper sticker "if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." I feel that it draws attention to the public's tendency to sympathize more with boys "in trouble" than girls. I hate that they use the word "disturbing"... I wish the ad was a little more compassionate. It's like the message is weird and confusing because it's not complete.

"I see what they're trying to say, but if I was a pregnant teenager looking at that, it would probably make me feel even more isolated and conspicuous than I already did."

Yeah, the trick is to neither demonize teens who already got pregnant nor encourage teens to get pregnant and/or encourage guys to get teens pregnant.

"I assumed the goal is to get the attention of people who live in communities where teen pregnancy is so common that people take it for granted. To say 'hey, boys being pregnant isn't normal, and we should work towards a time when teenage girls being pregnant isn't either.'

"I don't think it demonizes pregnant teen girls, or says that consequences of sex would matter more if they fell harder on boys. I think it just says 'Stop taking this for granted, get off your ass and do something about the problem.'"

That's the impression I got too.

The text reads:

"Milwaukee has one of the highest teen birth rates. And it's a burden the rest of us end up carrying. Through higher taxes for healthcare, education and other services teen mothers can't afford. So get beyond disturbed. Get involved at onemilwaukee.org."

The ad campaign is affiliated with project HOPE:

"an agency-wide social marketing campaign to increase community awareness about reproductive health, pregnancy prevention, prevention of STD/HIV, sexual abuse and the May National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month."

National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month is promoted by Advocates for Youth, whose position is: "Accurate, balanced sex education – including information about contraception and condoms – is a basic human right of youth. Such education helps young people to reduce their risk of potentially negative outcomes, such as unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Such education can also help youth to enhance the quality of their relationships and to develop decision-making skills that will prove invaluable over life."

Seems all right to me.

I just plain don't get it. Even after reading the comments and all of the interpretations here . . . I just don't get it. Are we supposed to be reacting to the image as disturbing because it's a teenage boy that's pregnant? Because I'm not really sure that anyone would look at that photo and say "oh my god, it's a pregnant teenager" instead of "oh my god, it's a pregnant guy."

. . . yeah. I just don't get it.

To those who think this a slut-shaming ad: Check out the links. This campaign is trying to make the point that teen pregnancy is a SHARED burden. Sorry for the double-post.

my reaction is honestly -- um, gross?

I think it's a very poor ad. Well, stupid really, and offensive.

The idea of male pregnancy is odd rather than disturbing. And teen pregnancy is more of a concern than something that is disturbing.

What I particularly dislike about this ad is the belief that teen pregnancy is 'a burden the rest of us end up carrying', as if there is no cost to the teen mother, or that any cost is secondary to my cost in providing her support through various social services. That is the idea being presented that I find disturbing.

Lower levels of health, education, employment prospects, financial independence, and other such costs for teen mothers is what concerns me, not that I end up paying higher taxes. Indeed, I'd be quite happy to pay higher taxes if it meant that programmes could be funded that aid teen mothers improve their health, education, employment and financial independence.

I visited the website that is being advertised, but it seems to be still under construction, so there is no info as to what it's all about. From the flash intro their intentions are good. I just hope they do a better job of it than how the ad comes across. I certainly hope they advocate comprehensive and compulsory sex education for teens. Especially an education that allows teens to develop a healthy attitude towards sex and sexuality in addition to the general nuts-and-bolts stuff.

The rhetoric of this ad is meaningless in terms of preventing unwanted teenage pregnancy. It offers the viewer no possible solution to the problem. Is the ad advocating comprehensive sex education or abstinence-only sex education? I challenge you to answer that question using only the information in the ad. It could really go either way.

But what does the reader take away from the ad? That teenage pregnancy is a burden that we (i.e. society) carry. Notice that it doesn’t say it’s a burden that the community shares with the mother. As if the mother has no burden. Let’s see, where have we heard that before? How about the archetype of the welfare queen – the unwed, poor, black woman who keeps getting pregnant in order to cash more welfare checks.

I don’t care how great the organization responsible for it may be, the ad is still terrible.

So, if this ad is pointing out the individual consequences of teen pregnancy, it's "slut-shaming," but if it's about the public consequences, it trivializes the plight of the teenage mother?

::facepalm:: Fine. I retract my statement.

This is a bad campaign because the link it provides is vague, requiring additional Google searches to get any concrete information; and because it seems to cause violent outrage in the people who agree with the policies it's promoting.

No sir, I don't like it one bit. That is one guilt ridden shame flinging campaign!

My first thought on looking at this had nothing to do with pregnancy: I thought, does he have tapeworms? A tumor?

Also, what's so disturbing about male pregnancy? There are advances happening in medicine that could make this a reality in our lifetimes, and I think that's wonderful for the people who'd want it.

So essentially...this poster is capitalizing on a patriarchal fear of defying gender roles. Good for them if they're promoting comprehensive sex education and not shaming and lies to kids, but still...it's poorly done.

My first thought on looking at this had nothing to do with pregnancy: I thought, does he have tapeworms? A tumor?

Also, what's so disturbing about male pregnancy? There are advances happening in medicine that could make this a reality in our lifetimes, and I think that's wonderful for the people who'd want it.

So essentially...this poster is capitalizing on a patriarchal fear of defying gender roles. Good for them if they're promoting comprehensive sex education and not shaming and lies to kids, but still...it's poorly done.

Beeer belly!

I like the idea of shared responsibility and have always been bothered that women alone have to bare the "shame" of teen pregnancy while men are not as ridiculed. I'm not sure you can really demonstrate both "You shouldn't get pregnant as a teenager" and "If you do, there is help" on the same ad. Thats a lot of information and it can be contradictory. I think that inevitably there will be some isolation for the mom and I'd really rather have the two people that made the mistake feel that, then risk not getting the message that teen pregnancy isn't a good ideaacross. Because it's not a good idea. I don't think i'm making a moral evaluation here, just a practical one. It's just too bad that burden isn't shared by both parties responsible. To me, the ad evokes that (but yes, a profile shot would be better)whether it intends to or not.

I honestly just thought he had a beer belly. The the tag line just kind of confused me. We should be disturbed when girls have beer bellies? What?

Then I read further and found out that it was about pregnancy. The ad seems to insinuate that guys get pregnant all the time but no one cares. But of course, that's physically impossible.

In my opinion it's not a very well thought out or executed ad.

Maybe a picture of a teen girl, standing at an angle so it's obvious that she's pregnant. With the tag line "It's not as uncommon as you think." or something to the effect of her needing assistance?

I agree that this is just bizarre and it doesn't really disturb as, I suppose, it is intended.

I would note in passing that I don't agree with one of the comments above, about "the public's tendency to sympathize more with boys 'in trouble' than girls." I don't mean for this to be controversial because I completely sympathize with the concerns expressed in this post and I know this is a feminist site. But I think the comment creates somewhat of a false impression that we haven't failed our sons; we have, and frankly, we fail them in some of the same ways we fail our girls -- by gender stereotyping. Because of a personal experience, I am involved in, and support efforts to reduce the staggering rate of young male suicide, which is a problem largely ignored in this society, in part because boys are supposed to "tough" and they're supposed to be macho. I learned through very sad personal experience in my family that this stereotype can kill -- because we brush off problems boys struggle with.

I know this is not the forum for such discussion, and in no manner do I mean to suggest that "boys have it tougher than girls." But I think it does a disservice to those trying to get at root causes of teen male suicide, not to mention other problems that target our "macho" boys, to suggest that all is well with the boys when, in fact, the same patriarchy that hurts our girls is also hurting our boys.

If you hadn't told me it was about teen pregnancy, I would have assumed they were attacking obesity. Or, since he's far from obese, they were very crassly saying that any form of fat is unattractive, guy or girl. And then I was going to go on this really great rant about how I've never seen such a blatant attempt to make teens feel badly about themselves for gaining a few pounds in my life, thus reiterating how values in this country have gone horribly downhill...

but it's about teen pregnancy.

Gee, I wonder if girlfriend ran out on him when they got the pregnancy results too?

I agree with those who have said that the word "disturbing" was a poor choice.

I also agree that the image could have been better, (if he had been standing in profile, it would have probably looked less like a beer belly) but I think it could have worked with better text accompanying it. Something along the lines of shared consequences of unprotected sex.

The ad seems to give the impression that girls are the only ones really affected by teen pregnancy, but wouldn't it be crrrazy if boys were too!? That, and it's time to get kids to start protecting themselves -- not because we really care about them, but so those damn teen mothers stop draining the system.

This has actually been on my mind recently, because of the inescapable Jamie Lynn Spears "scandal" and all the related discussion.

I've never liked it when my fellow pro-choice, pro-comprehensive-sex-ed citizens expect me to target teen pregnancy/single motherhood itself as the root of all evil, as the big thing to prevent. Partly because I'm reluctant to share any kind of goal with the people who belong to the "cover yourself up and keep your damn legs together until you find a man who's willing to marry your ass" camp, and partly because it cuts pro-choice and pro-education goals down to reducing government spending or lowering the high-school dropout rate or untangling the adoption system or whatever.

I can't speak for anyone else, but while those are admirable goals, none of them is the reason I want comprehensive sex ed and easily accessible abortions, or the reason I'm a feminist. There are issues of principle here: people being denied basic information about their own bodies, women having their reproductive organs invaded by a government that thinks it owns them, teenagers not being trusted to know what they want and make responsible choices or given the tools to do so, girls being told to measure their every sexual choice against the yardstick of public opinion, boys being told to have tons of sex and not care about any of it, slut-shaming, rape apology, and a thousand more. Sorry, but the thought of a pregnant teenage girl doesn't "disturb" me. Parental-consent laws disturb me. The Silver Ring Thing disturbs me. Rush Limbaugh disturbs me. People shooting up abortion clinics disturbs me. The fact that in my eleven-and-a-half years of public education I've never had an actual sex-ed class of any kind disturbs me.

This ad may encourage the right kind of action, but it does so by appealing to people's squeamishness about teen pregnancy and antipathy toward those they perceive as bad citizens or drains on society -- "welfare queens" and what have you. I don't know, maybe that's just good advertising. But I still resent it.

This is a really well intentioned organization with a really poor ad campaign. I googled them and found a video that again, attempts to show that teen pregnancy impacts schools, hospitals, governement budgets, etc. but ends with the baby being handed to what looks like a very happy teen mother.

It's too bad because I think they are trying to engage the whole community in solving a very real problem (a high teen pregnancy rate) but they don't seem to know how to do it.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=9226706

I thought he looked like he was starving, as in those ads for charities that feed hungry people in third world areas.

But now that I know it's about pregnancy, my reaction is that it's saying, "Pregnancy is gross and girls who get pregnant don't look pretty anymore, which means they're disgusting." So as you can tell, I agree that this ad sucks.

I agree with a lot of what's been said, but I just want to defend the people who created the ad a little bit. Clearly, other people will see this ad and be affected by it, but I think it's important to consider the target audience of this ad, which I think is those people who currently don't care about teen pregnency because they don't think it effects them.

I find that when I argue with conservative friends about comprehensive healthcare I have to fall back on arguments which I feel are reprehensible but that they find quite reasonable. I feel to ashamed to even post them here, but they are the arguements they find convincing primarily because they illustrate how these matters financialy and physically effect. Would it be a stretch for me to say that most of the arguments made on this site would probably not be appreciated by a large portion of Americans? For many of the Americans I know, which of course may not be representative, welfare is ruining America because it's encouraging lazy people to be lazy. They refuse to see it as a way for American's to get back on their feet. These people see ads like this and if they seem to suggest in anyway caring for "lazy" people they spot the weakness and turn their heads on them. In the same way we turn our heads on this head because it fails to properly support our view, but our view doesn't need changing in this case because we already care about teen pregnancy.

I think it's terrible that organizations with good intentions have to advertise their causes in unsavory ways, but we Americans are fickle, cheap, and selfish to the end.

"Partly because I'm reluctant to share any kind of goal with the people who belong to the 'cover yourself up and keep your damn legs together until you find a man who's willing to marry your ass' camp,"

Actually, a lot of the people out there in that camp actively *promote* teen pregnancy. Condemning premarital dating sure isn't condemning teen pregnancy when one's marrying off his daughter at 14 or 12 or 8...

"This is a really well intentioned organization with a really poor ad campaign."

Indeed.

"I googled them and found a video that again, attempts to show that teen pregnancy impacts schools, hospitals, governement budgets, etc. but ends with the baby being handed to what looks like a very happy teen mother."

...as if having a kid too early doesn't hurt the girl too. Bah.

"Clearly, other people will see this ad and be affected by it, but I think it's important to consider the target audience of this ad, which I think is those people who currently don't care about teen pregnency because they don't think it effects them."

Good point. You gotta speak your audience's language to get your point across, after all.

"I think it's terrible that organizations with good intentions have to advertise their causes in unsavory ways, but we Americans are fickle, cheap, and selfish to the end."

It's not even just an American thing...

Misspelled, I agree with your points re your reasons for supporting comprehensive sex ed, but I'm a little reluctant about the suggestion that teens can be trusted to know what they want/make responsible choices if they're equipped the right way. Teens are somewhere between childhood and adulthood -- some of them are absolutely mature enough to make wise decisions. Others just plain aren't. And while I don't think it's fair to penalize an entire age group because of a percentage of idiots, at the same time we can't look at teens and assume they'll react the same way as reasonable adults.

That isn't to say I don't think they should be taught everything about sex -- absolutely, they should. But that doesn't mean they will make responsible choices any more than (or even as much as) adults, and in fact they would probably benefit from additional mentorship/guidance, which sadly far too few teens have, thanks to American corporate capitalism severely infringing on parents' abilities to be good parents [unrelated rant redacted].

They needed to have a focus group before releasing this ad campaign--it's just a terrible ad. Bad photoshopping, left aligned text that's hard to read, and an obscure message that's grammatically incorrect. There's not much to like about it.

It took me a moment register that "It shouldn't be any less to disturbing when it's a girl" is just a strange way of saying: "It should be just as disturbing when it's a girl". Which, needless to say, is not a statement that's going to win them any friends.

Maybe I'm just a creep, but I the poster featured on this site to be weirdly sexual.
I'm thinking about his hip-bone lines you can see just above his pants. The only time I remember seeing lines like that were on Brad Pitt when he was in Fight Club.

So now I'm associating these posters with a naked Brad Pitt and its disturbing because these boys are teenagers.
Oh wait! There's the disturbing part! Because they are pregnant teens that look sexual! Maybe thats what the poster is about- sexualizing pregnant teenagers.

TLF, I hate to put it so bluntly, but: too bad.

We live in the world we live in. We can't save stupid people from themselves; they have sovreignty over their own lives and actions to exactly the same extent that you and I do. I've certainly met people who've left me wishing I could ensure that they'd never have sex or never have kids, because I'm sure they'd be horrible sexual partners or horrible parents. But I can't.

An adolescent's life is full of sex-related decisions, no matter how sexually active she is or isn't and how limited her options are. Even if she chooses to wait to have sex, even if she doesn't date, even if... fill-in-the-blank, she lives in a sexual culture she has to parti