"It's good to have choices, it's good to have Beyaz"-- an unnerving commercial

I was enjoying my first real day of Summer vacation today by lounging around in my pj's watching "Best Wedding Cakes in America" when one of the most shocking and unnerving commercials I have ever seen came on. No, it wasn't a Victoria's Secret Commercial or an ad for Go Daddy, it was for a drug called Beyaz.

The commercial began innocently enough, I suppose, although it struck me as kind of strange from the get go. I'll try to paint the scene for you:

Four young, attractive, women enter a beautiful sunlit shop. One of the women takes a diploma off of a shelf marked "Grad School," as the narrator says, "You know what you want today, but you never know what you may want tomorrow."

The women continue to look around the room. "It's good to have choices," the narrator remarks. Display tables and shelves fill the "store," containing miniatures of all that life has to offer: a table full of what could be Ken-dolls of all ethnicities, shapes and sizes, labelled "Significant other"; a shelf of all kinds of houses; a scaled down Eiffel Tower with a tag calling it "a trip to Paris."

One of the women, a curly-haird brunette, walks by a display of a stork holding a baby bundle in its beak. (By this point the narrator has already introduced the product: Beyaz, a contraceptive pill. "It's good to have choices, it's good to have Beyaz.") The woman glances at the stork but keeps on walking. The stork then steps out of the display and the woman turns around. It nods its head at her, offering the bundle. She shakes her head and dismisses the bird and what it has to offer, smiling all along and choosing a trip to Paris instead.

As the narrator lists off the negative side effects of Beyaz, the smiling women finish their shopping trip, and happily get into their car with their purchases. Ah, life is such bliss when you can choose to live only for yourself.


It's true this commercial wasn't graphic. There was nothing out rightly offensive. It was the undertones of the commercial that I found unnerving.

First of all, the idea the one can pick and choose through all that life has to offer seems so artificial, fake. Probably because it is an artificial idea. Life simply isn't like that, whether or not you're on birth control. Birth control does not mean "life control," that somehow because one has the "ability" to "choose" whether or not to have a child she has perfect control over all aspects of her life.

Second, this commercial presents the idea that ultimately you have to choose: a child or your own happiness and dreams. It all comes down to the choice between the baby bundle and the trip to Paris. According to the makers of Beyaz, you can't have both. You know you want to go to grad school, have a hot significant other, live in a gorgeous house and, of course, go to Paris, today, but you never know what you may want tomorrow, so don't take any chances at losing your own happiness by getting pregnant. While this is never blatantly said, it is the undertone of the commercial.

Overall this commercial left a bad taste in my mouth that lasted all day. I kept thinking about those smiling women and how sad it was that even though they thought they were choosing what was best, they were actually losing something so much better. They were missing the point. We aren't here to live for ourselves. We aren't here to grab at those things we think will make us happy and hang on to them for dear life. Where's the choice in that? Where's the choice in being so caught up in what we think we want and will make us happy that we aren't willing to give those things up for something better?
It was sad to see the gift of life treated as just another "product" in the "store" of life, as something that could be "purchased" when it happened to be convenient for the consumer, as something that could be exchanged for something of equal or lesser value, as something that could be passed over like a style of shoes that are so last year.