The Nudey Poster

My students are currently in the middle of a persuasive group marketing campaign project where they have a product and they target a specific demographic audience and use certain specific appeals. Along with creating a commercial, they have to create a print advertisement. Well, the print ads are starting to be completed and I got something today that I wasn't quite prepared for... it had nudey pics on it!

At first I just looked at it very quickly, shook my head and said, I'm not sure that is G rated. The boy argued saying that "his target audience was black males ages 15-25 and there is not a single black male 15-25 who wouldn't want to see all these beautiful women". I brushed it off for the time being until I got a chance to look over the poster more carefully later that day after school. Not only were the women scantly dressed, there was one picture of a girl in some daisy dukes with no top on and her long black locks draping over her chest to cover her nipples. When I notice the second severely inappropriate picture, I started to ask myself if these kids are just really naive and unaware of what these pictures infer... it was a girl in a red bra and panties DUCK TAPED to a chair! Are you kidding me! What made this kid think that he was going to get away with this! And the worst part is that he told a little freshman girl in his group exactly what to do and she was the one who actually cut the pictures out of the magazines and glued them to the poster board! I mean, what did her mom think as she had pictures of black women half naked strung across the dinner table as she pasted them together!

Well, if you are wondering, I told the kids they had to redo the poster. Of course they were pretty angry with me. The girls in the group accepted my request very quickly, knowing that it was probably going to happen. The male student however, fought me like I was taking away his brand new precious puppy. After about 5 min of arguing the discussion ended with me saying... "Well I don't mind writing a pass for you to go take the poster down to the vice principal to see if he thinks it would be appropriate to show in class. " Silence.