Au Natural

About a month ago I was listening to Pandora (Internet radio, for the uninitiated). Pandora is funded by playing ads periodically throughout the music, and generally they try to target the ads based on what you've stated as your geographic location, gender and age. I've been disappointed in the ads that are played most often for me. Generally they are for products or services I'm not remotely interested in, and sadly, there isn't a way for me to tell Pandora that they've pegged me incorrectly. (I really like that Hulu has a little button in the corner where you can indicate whether or not an ad is relevant to you.) The most annoying thing about Pandora ads is the overabundance of McDonald's commercials. I hate McDonald's commercials even more than I hate their food, so these are particularly aggravating to me.

But nothing can quite top the advertisements for a nearby clinic/spa place that features "natural" breast augmentation. My initial thought when these ads started playing for me was to question how "natural" any breast augmentation really is. Let's be realistic. The most natural thing for my breasts to do is to do whatever they do after I breastfeed a few kids for a year a piece. That's natural. Doing anything else to them is not natural. I'm not saying I'm necessarily opposed to women who do choose to have breast augmentation procedures. I just question whether any sort of intentional changes to what the body would actually do if left alone can be called natural. I do not think the two ideas are compatible.

Second, I am bothered by our obsession with natural things. Not everything in nature is good for you body, and yet, when marketing folks use phrases like "all-natural" something in our brains makes us think the product must be good for us. Poison ivy is natural. Rattlesnake venom is natural. Molten lava occurs naturally. And yet, I do not want any of these things in my body.