Remember the J. Crew pink toenail controversy? MRC’s Culture and Media Institute started a firestorm of controversy last spring by drawing attention to an ad in which Jenna Lyons, J. Crew president and creative director, was painting her son’s toenails pink.
The caption in that ad read: “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.”
The Daily Mail and Huffington Post reported that Lyons is leaving her husband for her lesbian lover.
The J. Crew ad was clearly meant to serve as pro-transgender propaganda or at least normalize gender confusion. On FoxNews.com, Dr. Keith Ablow argued that such behavior would cause “psychological sterilization.” ABCnews.com later reported pro-homosexual propaganda is the norm at J. Crew, in a piece with the headline “J. Crew at Center of Gay Economics With Openly Gay Model.”
But predictably, many in the media scornfully dismissed the transgender aspects of the ad, and portrayed members of the conservative community as hysterical, hypersensitive fools. Comedian Jon Stewart derisively referred to the controversy as “Toemaggedon” on the Daily Show. The networks featured “experts” like Dr. Susan Bartell, who solemnly intoned on The Early Show: “[Our kids] gender is going to emerge naturally as part of who they are and has nothing to do with whether we put pink nail polish on them.”
But the company line at J. Crew, and recent behavior of Lyons, tells a different story. Could it possibly be that the media was wrong on this issue, and CMI was right?
