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Notes -
An aging species tries to save itself
We begin with Do It For Denmark. The angle in this ad campaign is sex. Don't you want to have sex? No? Well, do it for your country, or at least your mother, who wants grandchildren. We'll also throw in a travel discount for a romantic holiday getaway, where you will hopefully have sex. Of course, the declining appeal of sex is probably not the main cause of declining birth rates.
Like Denmark, Iran also has a fertility rate of around 1.7, but of course we find a more conservative version of the exhortation to build a family in this ad from an Iranian cultural center. The sell now focuses on the benefits of a tradwife: she'll replace your alarm clock, cook you healthy meals, and give you children. I guess they saw no need for an ad on the benefits of a tradhusband.
For the most direct and honest appeal we turn to Taiwan, whose fertility rate of 1.0-1.2 portends a crisis possibly even worse than the much-discussed demographics of its belligerent neighbor. To a soundtrack that tries to be hopeful, this PSA from the Taiwanese ministry of education, which I recommend watching, pleads its case:
I don't know about you, but the earnestness and sheer desperation in this plea really broke me down. And I have no reason to think the whole project isn't exactly that: an act of desperation.
Are they confusing having sex and having kids? Or are they implying low fertility rate is the consequence of people not having enough sexual intercouse, and if so, is there any data to support it?
That said, I can just imagine what a field day would people on some alt-right forums will have with the fact that Europeans now apparently need to be convinced to have sex (and the ad seems to place emphasis on the male as the party not wanting to rumble).
That said, I applaud to whoever in the marketing dept thought of this. Tapping into retiree's incomes to sell them active vacations they can't actually do is not an easy task, but they found a way.
Oh come on, my woke copywriter bro, breastfeeding is breaking down conventional roles for a male, walking with one's son never has been.
Not sure how this is going to help the issue? I imagine the grammatical structure of wokese does not admit any other way of expressing it, though.
But some of the decisions are so wrong, or we wouldn't be doing this ad.
It will all undoubtedly prove a huge waste of taxpayer money. But doubleplusgood woke duckspeak, to be sure. Maybe one day they'd be so desperate as to kick out the wokesters, but that day is definitely not today.
All the reports of men being harassed for taking their child to the park because people are assuming they're some kind of paedophile kidnapper indicate otherwise.
"All the reports"? I'm a father. I take my kid to parks. Other dads do also. I've never seen or 2nd hand heard of a dad being accused of anything at a public park. I accept that it must have happened sometime somewhere in a nation of hundreds of millions of people. But I believe such a thing is vanishingly rare.
I once took a teenaged non-blood-relative out to dinner. Given our relative ages and racial differences it should be obvious I'm not her dad and you wouldn't know we are relatives by marriage. I wondered if I looked like a creep. No one cared. No one gives a damn about a 30 year old eating dinner with a teenaged girl.
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