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Wednesday, April 24, 2002

By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette architecture critic

What a pair of chuckleheads. Or are they? Right now, Jim Krenn and Randy Baumann are looking more like savvy marketers, with a provocative ad campaign successful beyond their wettest dreams.

The bosomy billboard promoting their WDVE morning radio show is getting a rise all over town, including a flurry of letters to the editor followed by a story and photo in the Post-Gazette and other media reports.

Made you look, made you talk, made you write.

On the billboard, the woman has been reduced to her essential elements, two glistening and apparently inflated breasts held aloft by a bikini top under the ejaculation, "What a pair!" Note the absence of a head enclosing a brain, clearly expendable in the world of morning radio, where grown men traffic in seventh-grade-boy humor. It's a living.

And in a free, if not entirely civilized, country, it has its place, one which most of us can avoid simply by tuning out.

The billboards, on the other hand, are unavoidable and confrontational, thrusting mammoth breasts in the faces of unsuspecting drivers and passengers of all ages. One of the places the mindless mammary glands are mounted is on Fifth Avenue in Oakland, just across the street from Carlow, the Catholic women's college. Study all you want, babe, the billboard says, but in this town a woman's worth is still measured by her bra size. We only can wonder what lessons Carlow's elementary school students are gleaning on their morning and afternoon commutes.

In serendipitous irony, the Fifth Avenue billboard is immediately followed by a hospital billboard bearing the slogan, "Nobody treats women like we do."

It's natural to want to look at women's breasts; they represent nurturing at its most basic level. Many cultures have big-breasted fertility symbols, such as Austria's Venus of Willendorf, dating to about 30,000 B.C.

But the headless breasts of "What a pair!" are about something else. Obviously Krenn and Baumann are using sex to sell radio. What troubles me is what they are selling to our daughters and to our sons.

Clear Channel Communications regional vice president John Rohn, one of Krenn and Baumann's bosses, says the image is no more explicit than what you'd find on the cover of Cosmo.

Mammogram to John Rohn: SIZE MATTERS.

So does context.

Part of the larger context here is the integration of Clear Channel's sexist message with the landscape. There are 11 "What a pair!" billboards around Pittsburgh, every one sending the not-so-subliminal message that this building, this street, this neighborhood, this city supports treating women as if their breasts are more important than their brains.

Let me state the obvious: This is a problem we wouldn't have if we didn't have so damn many billboards.

Pittsburgh, an enthusiastic outdoor advertising exec once said, is a great town for billboards. Planted on verdant hillsides and on roads with vistas, they can be seen for miles. And mega-billboards, like the ones that support the "Attack of the 50-Foot Bosom" ads, probably can be seen from the moon.

Between Craft Avenue and the Birmingham Bridge, there are 15 billboards on Fifth Avenue. There are 22 billboards on 18th Street between Carson Street and Mount Oliver, 41 on the Boulevard of the Allies between Downtown and Schenley Park, 33 on Allegheny River Boulevard between Washington Boulevard and Verona.

There are 37 billboards on Washington Boulevard between Hamilton Avenue and Negley Run, including two on the massive sandstone piers of the Lincoln Avenue Viaduct. The intersection of this bridge with its counterpart, the Brilliant Cutoff Viaduct, is one of Pittsburgh's great architectural events -- and a backdrop for ads.

Blessed with one of the world's most scenic cities, we allow it to be sullied and ourselves bombarded with an endless onslaught of billboards.

What boobs we are.

Patricia Lowry is the Post-Gazette architecture critic. Her e-mail address is plowry@post-gazette.com.