The Depravity of the Pedicure

J. Crew’s recent ad for the latest $65 Coastline-Stripe Pullover and $8 Essie Nail Polish has gotten Fox in a frenzy. In the ad, Jenna Lyons and her son, Beckett, are shown laughing together with his pink-toed foot in her hand.  Clearly, Essie looks smashing, even on a rough-and-tumble toddler; the ad evokes warm feelings of family togetherness and the playful abandon that your children can inspire within you. But according to the ominous paranoid ramblings of Dr. Keith Ablow, boys who play with pink might as well chop off their weenies now to save on doctor bills later: “Yeah, well, it may be fun and games now, Jenna, but at least put some money aside for psychotherapy for the kid—and maybe a little for others who’ll be affected by your ‘innocent’ pleasure.” In his conspiracy-theorist tangent, he links Beckett’s playtime pedicure to “assaults on genuine emotion and genuine relationships,” the sexualization of young girls, “split-second Prozac prescriptions,” and — the old Fox standby: ethnic self-hate — making false claims to African-American heritage and, inversely, bleaching African-American skin in order to appear Caucasian.

He further claims that the fallout of this $8 Essie Nail Polish will include: the abandonment of all gender identity, the psychological turmoil of our entire species, a mass compulsion to “grotesquely amputate body parts” (an obnoxious and outrageous contortion of the sex-change operation procedure), female-on-female violence, a society that tosses out family in exchange for sexual gratification and refuses to serve in the armed forces, and, finally, the downfall of the entire human race.

So my question is this… what about all those girls who wear pants and baseball caps? Should we worry about the girls who aren’t painting their toenails, since they’re clearly just denying who they really are? Does it take just one pedicure to destroy a boy child’s psyche, or does this irreversible damage only occur after several instances? Can boys avoid psychological destruction if they use blue nail polish?

Keith… come on, now. Put your eyeballs back into your head and get a grip.

Why did they ever get rid of Glenn Beck? At least he would’ve made a frenetic flow chart for us to follow. Perhaps Mr. Ablow’s aversion to medication is rooted in the fear of his self-diagnosis… maybe a healthy dose of Prozac is just what this doctor needs.