An ad I just saw for Ancestry.com uses an unfortunate choice
of words near the beginning, and it’s a sorry comment on our society that it
comes across like it does. What happens in the ad is that some woman says that
she wanted to find out more about her father because “he touched so many
people”. This commercial came on directly after a news story update of the
Jerry Sandusky child-molestation trial, and the only thing that came to mind
was a sexual misconduct allegation when she said: “he touched so many people”. This is just an innocent expression
that means something nice, but due to the euphemistic treatment of molestation
over the years by authority figures, etc., it has also come to mean
molestation. So even if this ad did not directly follow a news segment about
child molesting, it still might make us think of such things, and I think
that’s a sorry state of affairs.
Seriously, when Michele Bachmann’s charge against the HPV
vaccine mandate for school girls mainly brought to mind the imagined retort
from Governor Rick Perry: “Well Michele, this doesn’t actually encourage sexual
activity: we just want to protect them from this disease, since they’re all
just going to end up sleeping with their teachers anyway”, then there’s a real
problem.
I can’t find this ad on YouTube, but it’s very much like
many other ads for Ancestry.com (I’ll attach one from Australia so you can see
what they’re like):
