New York Governor Wants to Ban Boob Enhancement Ads on Subway

The governor of New York is pushing to have “racy” ads for breast enhancements removed from the city’s subway system.

Via CBS New York:

New York transit officials are agreeing to reconsider their advertising standards after a top aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo objected to a cleavage-baring ad for breast enhancement. Howard Glaser, Cuomo’s director of state operations, wrote to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Tuesday asking the agency to take action after the New York Daily News wrote about the revealing advertisement. In the letter, Glaser noted that thousands of children use the transit system every day.

Of course boobies that corrupt innocent, doe-eyed children are to blame for all of this.

“The MTA is a public conveyance, subsidized by $190 million annually in the state budget, plus over $5 billion in dedicated taxes,” Glaser wrote. “The public has a right to expect that the MTA will strive for a family-friendly environment.”

“I have a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old and she did see that and she just stared at it for a couple seconds and you know what’s going on,” Sidney Bowen said.

OK, I don’t want to pick on someone who had some local TV news crew shove a camera in her face so they could get a soundbite for the evening news. But ummm——NO I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON. Your daughter is looking at breasts? Stupid, over-inflated breasts? Breasts that someone laughably thinks can’t be seen anywhere else except this subway car that you just happened to be in? How do you handle it when your kid sees a woman who has had this kind of surgery in real life? Do you just let them stare uncontrollably like Alex in the reprogramming scene in Clockwork Orange? Do they not cover accidentally seeing big boobs in Mommy & Me classes?

Honestly, I cannot imagine one thing in the entire world that New Yorkers could give less of a shit about than the stupid, cheesy ads for plastic surgery plastered in the subway. If you think a few pictures of fully clothed, busty women are the most disturbing, possibly traumatic things little kids riding the subway in New York are going to see then you are living life with some beautiful Buick-sized blinders on. Sure, these ads are another tawdry, exploitative and dumb example of shitty advertising that promote a stupid, unrealistic image of women. But censoring them in response to a lot of WON’T ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN outcry just feels wildly misguided.

If you want to encourage a legitimate conversation about the way we portray women and our bodies in advertising, great. I’m all for it. But if you want to play the Amish card and shove these images out of the limelight because young children might be asking uncomfortable questions about them, then yeah, I have serious a problem with that.