Ad nausea

I heard an intelligent Baltimore County Police Officer, Officer Bridges, talking to NPR about the duties and limits of being a school resource officer, in the wake of the incident down south where an SRO dragged a young woman out of her chair in an alarmingly brutal fashion.

Officer Bridges correctly pointed out that classroom discipline is not the purpose of school police.  The teacher who cannot handle his or her own students ought to find another line of work.  

And he said that he and his colleagues are trained to deal with adolescents, and reminded that the mind is not totally formed until the age of 21.

I bring this up because one of two things happened in the advertising people of Bloomingdale's, the big deal department store in Gotham. It's either that they hired a 13-year old to write the copy for their Christmas catalog, or the person who did write the words for the picture below is, indeed, above 21 years, supposedly educated, but insufficiently mature to realize that date rape is not so funny.

You realize that most of advertising is based on the power of suggestion. As in, just plunk down some money and make a few dozen lucky choices among football players, and make $137 million.  Or use a certain brand of makeup and have strangers mistake you for Christie Brinkley.  Or drink more beer and have more friends than can fit into a stadium.

Or be a sneaky perv and surreptitiously put alcohol in a woman's holiday egg nog so you can lower her inhibition and decision-making ability and have your filthy way with her, because you know she would never have you if she were stone cold sober.

It's a shame that whoever wrote this and decided to have a Robin Thicke lookalike pose for it doesn't know any better, but (most of) the rest of us have moved along and do not approve of drugging women in order to seduce them.

Of course, once this was pointed out to the Bloomingdale's bigwigs, they about broke their necks to tweet the following: 

So did they also send this ephebic, unsophisticated copy writer back to school for some growing up?  We'll have to see if their spring catalog recommends throwing mud on girls on the playground.