Wed. April 13, 2011
San Francisco -
An online advertisement that features J. Crew President Jenna Lyons painting her son's toenails pink has lit up a controversy on the internet, as conservative bloggers accuse the retailer of pushing homosexual and transgender propaganda.
The ad, called "Saturday with Jenna," was emailed to J. Crew customers last week.
It shows Lyons with her 5-year-old son Beckett. He's wearing a $65 J. Crew shirt and he's laughing as she paints his toenails pink.
"Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink," the ad reads.
FOX News contributor Keith Ablow was outraged at the blurring of gender lines.
"I wonder what Jenna would think if her son wanted to celebrate his masculinity with a little playacting as a cowboy, with a gun?" he wrote in an editorial. "Would that bring the same smile of joy and pure love that we see on her face in the J. Crew advertisement? Or would that be where she might draw the line?"
The conservative Media Research Center Network blasted the ad in an editorial entitled "J. Crew Pushes Transgender Child Propaganda."
But others, likes Forbes writer Katie Phillips, disagreed.
"I won't claim to know anything about parenting, but I do know this: we all want to be loved and accepted, especially by our parents," Phillips wrote. "It's my own mother's birthday on Friday, and I'd like to thank her for giving me Barbie dolls and Tonka Trucks. I'd like to thank her for letting me paint my nails pink, or blue, or, or polka-dotted, or black, or letting me venture without nail polish into a cruel and unforgiving world."
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