A new ad campaign from a U.K. based company features a young boy wearing makeup, jewelry, women’s shoes, and a dress he took from his mother’s closet.
The ad, for the John Lewis company, launched this week and is part of a promotion for the retailer’s home insurance work. Beginning with a shot of a disheveled room, the ad follows a little boy, wearing a dress, makeup, jewelry, and his mother’s shoes running around his house causing chaos. The boy splashes paint on his face and the walls, throws glitter from on top of a table, all while his mother and sister watch.
During the mayhem, Stevie Nicks song “Edge of Seventeen” plays until the ad’s tagline “Let life happen” flashes onto the screen.
“We wanted to inject joy, freedom and humor into this campaign. The story we landed on fulfills this, with the idea that when you have John Lewis’ Home Insurance with the option of accidental damage cover, you don’t need to worry anymore, you can just ‘let life happen’,” Claire Pointon, customer director for John Lewis, told Adweek in a statement.
“The ad playfully highlights the things that could happen as [the actor] dances around, freely expressing himself, from knocked vases and picture frames, to paint on the carpet and nail varnish along the bannisters,” Pointon continued.
The advertising agency responsible for producing the ad was the U.K.-based Adam&Eve/DDB. The agency’s previous work includes helping with Skittles “Recolor the Rainbow” campaign in June.
The ad earned praise from the LGBT media outlet, Pink News. Emma Maurice wrote, “the playful ad speaks to every gender non-conforming adult who was once a child sneaking into their parents’ closet.”
Some have critiqued the ad as another example of the push to sexualize children both at home and abroad.
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, argued that young children have been targeted in schools and in the culture with Leftist gender ideology saying that “the sexualization of kids has been commercialized through the entertainment industry”
“There’s something incredibly creepy about the sexual left’s obsession with our kids. For years now, they’ve been targeting children — sometimes as young as kindergarten-age — in schools with highly explicit sexual content as well as propaganda about the goodness of ‘changing’ genders,” Schilling said in a statement to The Daily Wire.
“Now, the corporate world is jumping aboard the bandwagon. These latest attempts by woke companies to normalize gender confusion and the destruction of innocence in young children is perversely wrong; indeed, it’s nothing short of child abuse,” he continued, “And it’s important that every sane leader still out there call it out as such. No healthy society should tolerate this.”
In recent weeks, many parents have spoken out at school board meetings in the United States about their concerns, including the availability of sexually explicit books in their children’s school libraries.
One Ohio mayor told the school board in his town that they must resign or face criminal charges for the school having a writing prompt book containing graphic sexually inappropriate prompts used in classes.