Read books, get sex: That's what racy advertisements on hundreds of city buses are suggesting to teens - and red-faced transit bosses are outraged.
The salacious ads by hip-hop clothing line Akademiks declare: "Read Books, Get Brain."
But kids say "get brain" does not mean smarts. It's slang for oral sex. And the company behind the ads told the Daily News the slogan choice was no mistake.
"We knew this," fessed up Anthony Harrison, Akademiks' ad designer. "It's coded language, city slang. Teens know what it means but the general public doesn't."
High school students across the city immediately picked up on the dual meaning. One provocative ad features a curvy, panty-clad woman, on her knees, holding an open book. She isn't reading it.
"That's not kosher," said Sharntai Harris, a senior at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts.
"That's too sexy to be talking about some book," her classmate Melissa Medina agreed.
MTA officials were not so street-savvy, and since September have slapped the ads on the sides of 200 city buses, said Ahysha Donaldson, a spokeswoman for Akademiks.
When alerted by The News, MTA officials vowed to start stripping the ads off buses - and blasted Akademiks for hoodwinking them.
"It's sad that a company and its advertising agency would appear to be promoting a good cause while instead using vulgar street phrases to demean women," fumed MTA spokesman Tom Kelly.
In some posters, young men wear buttoned-down shirts, bulky sweaters and oversized jeans but the women are clad in hot pants and tight sweaters. In one ad, a boy is reading with a half-dressed girl sitting on his lap.
Several malls across the nation, including the Palisades Center Mall in West Nyack, Rockland County, refused to display the ads. But they do appear on buses and bus shelters in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco and Philadelphia, Akademiks officials said.
Akademiks said the MTA response is the first uproar - but also perhaps the first time a city has figured out the slang.
Harrison said the slogan "Read Books, Get Brain," which appears in English, Spanish and Japanese, is an inside joke between teens and the company.
"I don't think any kid is going to say, 'If I read "A Tale of Two Cities," I'm going to get sex,'" he said. "They aren't stupid. We were trying to make education relevant in the sea of everything going on now."
But Bronx high school teacher Jim Mills, who had overheard his students using the term brain, said he nearly slammed his car into the sidewalk when he saw an Akademiks ad on the side of a Jerome Ave. bus last week.
"They are trying to get boys to pick up a book, but the implication is they'll get sex if they get literate," said Mills. "It denigrates education and young women."
It marked the latest MTA advertising controversy. A new poster marking the 100th anniversary of the subway contains plugs for the Church of Scientology. And last month, the MTA yanked an ad for a Comedy Central animated series off buses because it showed a cartoon character pulling her shirt up.
Originally published on November 5, 2004
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New Ad to Youth: Read Books ... Get Brain
Hybrid Mode
