You know how young people keep having unprotected sex because they think pregnancy is just this cheap walk in the park? Thank goodness someone is getting around to showing them what’s what in a way that doesn’t involve carrying an egg in your pocket for a week. Pregnancy Text, which “lets you put a baby in your friends’ phones to get them thinking about teen pregnancy,” launches next week.
“Teens have to sign up for the project, which involves answering incessant text messages from a “baby” whose needs range from diaper changing to feeding. The texts are “fun and lighthearted, sassy without being mean,” Ruderman said — key to keeping teens interested. “I know you’re running late bu-GRRGLEBARFFFF. Oops, sorry about your shirt. Rappers spit rhymes, I spit up,” a sample text reads.”
Actually, culturally stale text messages from a sassy baby do sound pretty offputting.
“Yo mom! Your homework looks mad fresh. You know what else is? My diaper!”
“Hey pops, you remember Korn? Read me a story.”
“You go girl! To the crib store that is, because this model was recalled.”
“Oh no, there’s a bug on my stroller! Guess I’m really buggin’”
“Enjoying that new Michael Jackson song? Well I’m the King of Poop!”
The campaign, which is being promoted on DoSomething.org’s website and by the nonprofit’s student volunteers, only consists of text messages — there’s no plastic baby, egg or flour sack to keep safe, and the messages stop after 12 hours, when the “parenting” session ends.
The egg I get, but how hard is it to keep a flour sack safe? I have sack of flour in my pantry that’s been there for two months and it’s doing just fine. The last one got some bugs in it, but you live and you learn. Babies sound easy.
I mean whatever works though.
Tags: apps, culturally stale text messages, news, sassy babies, teen pregnancy
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key to keeping teens interested
has anyone involved in this project ever even met a teen
Teenage dirtbags would ignore this nonsense completely.
TD: No, I don’t have a condom but come on, I want you so bad. So bad, girl.
TG: I don’t know, I’ve been getting these texts from this, like, 90s-alternative baby and it’s got me thinking…
TD: I’ve got the only SMS messages you need, girl. So Much Sex messages.
goddammit emby I was drinking water while I read that and now my esophagus hurts from forcibly preventing myself from doing a spit-take all over my work computer.
I am so angry that I can only thumbs-up this comment once.
You.
I bet the board for that non-profit totally refer to teens as “young people”. I JUST BET.
TBH, when the Tinypuss was a few weeks old, Hamlet turned to me and say, “You know, this actually IS a lot like that project where you carry the egg around and don’t drop it, except I love her.” Newborns: More like inanimate objects than parents want to admit.
Also way more like puppies than anybody will admit, but come on!
My buddy has a 3 month old baby and he admitted it saying something like: before she couldn’t even focus her baby eyes on me or anything. Then she gave me her first smile and I said “finally, she’s more than just a living thing that sleeps and poops.”
I’m enjoying myself picturing Ophelia and Hamlet as a couple living in Brooklyn. They would fit in awfully well.
I’m glad they finally made it!
For the first three months, it’s basically like having a sickly cat.
None of this sounds like anything a teen would pay any attention to whatsoever.
“how do we stop teens getting pregnant? Better sex ed? Freely dispensed birth control? An attitude to sex and sexuality that isn’t ridiculously stuck in the dark ages? Nah, something about phones. Kids love their phones.”
“maybe we should use.. what do the kids call it? Tweeter“
“perhaps the baby could send an electronic mail to their facewalls!”
This shit is over after TWELVE HOURS? Bitch please, we had to keep that egg baby alive for like five days. Twelve hours. Kids these days are gonna think that having a baby is mildly annoying and out of touch for half a day and then it goes away and never returns. #getoffmylawn
Y’know, I feel seriously gipped. I went to parochial school during my formative teen years, and I never once got the assignment to take care of an egg or sack of flour for health class. I never even had health class. If what I learned from TV is any indication, I missed a great moment to further my understanding of myself and my potential love interest or greatest high school rival.
If it makes you feel any better, we did this, but not in pairs, so you just had to take care of your own egg for a few days…no teenage drama involved. Maybe they were being realistic about teaching us how to be single parents? Hm.
We had to make little sock puppets and name them and keep journals of their “activities.” I left mine on a train to Georgia, so my mom helped me make up a bunch of shit to write in the book thing. I learned a lot.
Was it a midnight train to Georgia? (sorrynotsorry)
We did this, but we were allowed to boil ourselves a new egg if we broke the first one. Which is, hm. Yeah. Not quite how it works.
Also, it was boring, because the other teachers made us leave our eggs in our lockers all day. Also not quite how babies work.
Sure it is – locker daycare!
There are so many things that television led me to believe were universal American high school rites of passage that my school just didn’t have, for whatever reason. Among them:
1. Egg babies.
2. Visits to the nurse’s office. (We had no school nurse.)
3. Talent shows.
4. Taking actual showers in school locker rooms after gym class.
We had none of these tings either (maybe a nurse? I don’t know for sure on that one…)
We had a class just for pregnant girls (and any boys who admitted to being the father of those babies) in our high school that was supposed to teach them to care for their babies. Sounds nice but they had to carry those crying plastic babies around which (a) the baby ship has sailed (b) just made them all more embarressed.
I thought this said your school had a class just for “pageant girls” which would have been equally fascinating.
It’s South Texas–every class is pageant class
We had those plastic babies that we took home for a weekend. They had a key you had to put in their back once they started ‘crying’ that you were supposed to hold in place until it stopped.
I figured out pretty quickly that you could just rest the baby on the floor with the key still in its back and it would stay balanced in place, so when that thing woke me up in the middle of the night I could just ram the key in its back and go back to sleep immediately.
Needless to say, at 28 the only living things I care for are plants.
My copious viewing of Teen Mom (don’t judge me) has led me to believe that there is no text-message program on earth that will keep teens from having ill-advised sex.
Also please tell me there’s a computer responding to these and not some poor intern tasked with “responding to these as a sassy pop-culture baby.”
I didn’t even consider what would happen when dirtbag teenagers inevitably reply to these things.
Baby: “Whoops! Spit up on your shirt! Guess you’ll have to change and be late for school!”
Teen: “FUCK OFF BABBY U DON’T KNO ME GTFO”
Baby: …wah?
Flour sacks will leak all over the place at the slightest provocation. So actually quite a lot like a newborn.
Raise your hand if you’re gonna prank your friends with this.
Hold up, you can send this to other people? AMAZING. April Fool’s day is coming up so soon.
omg this is going to be like cat facts all over again
Thank you for signing up for Pregnancy!
I keep my flour in the freezer and I never get bugs. The freezer treatment is not reccomended for actual babies
Ditto airtight containers. They never taught me that in sex ed.
They never taught us anything in sex ed besides that sex would kill you or make you pregnant and ruin your life and then kill you
This is why teenagers ignore those classes
I remember literally nothing from my week-long* sex-ed seminar** except during the safe-sex course when the instructor forgot to bring her assortment of condoms, so I pulled out my bag and tumbled a dozen or so out onto the table to the shock and scattered delight of some of my classmates.
A handful of my classmates tried to shame or tease me for having such a variety of condoms on me, but – uncharacteristically for me – I was just not having it. I was barely even sexually active, but they’d been giving them away all week and I believed in being prepared.
*one week, in senior year! WHICH IS PRETTY LATE FOR PREVENTING TEEN PREGNANCY Y’ALL. And the course coverage was inconsistent: we had one week-long off-campus conference during which students signed up for various talks and classes, so we each had to choose a slim segment of what was on offer.
**seminar heh iswydt
New hobby: pronouncing seminar as “semen-ar” and see if anyone corrects me.
I remember reading about an early Women’s Studies seminar that was officially referred to as an “ovular”. For twenty pages of article.
Aw, we did flour bag babies in school! Not in pairs though, we were all single parents which…was accurate, really. I named mine Humphrey and when the experiment was over, we made biscuits with him.
Haha, I got ur phone pregnant.
That’s how I interpreted “put a baby in your phone”
These texts read like the IM conversations from She’s Too Young, the magnum opus of Lifetime’s ‘this is what your virginal teen daughter is getting into because you’re too busy to love her’ scare-tactic films. I’m living for it.
OH MY GOD THIS MOVIE
My sisters and I still text each other or yell at each other, “SHE’S TOO YOUNG!!!”
So good.
Teenage Dirtbags just found a new way to punk all their friends. So long sound boards of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I have a texting sass baby now.
Ok, but who here has read Flour Babies?! IMHO, not as good as Fine’s The Book of the Banshee, but still pretty solid.
I read Flour Babies! I totally wished my school had a flour baby program, too. I never got to pretend to care for a baby, which was sad, because I knew I would do it REALLY WELL and not, you know, make a second replacement flour baby after losing the first one.
This was my exact reaction to this book!!!
I never had the egg or flour-sack exercise to do in HS, but then I never needed any convincing on the subject of “not having a baby.” The fact that no one wanted to touch me even with a 10-foot pole was irrelevant; conceptually (pun not intended), I was a Childfree Lifer from the get-go.
These texts are just embarrassing, but also, why do they have to be jokey and light-hearted? A much better approach would be for the “baby” to be like a really annoying Tamagotchi, or for it just to be third-person messages like, “you need to find a changing room and take care of that diaper NOW,” or, “Hour 4 of baby’s crying: have you tried putting her on a washing machine? Checking the diaper? Feeding her? Rocking her? Nothing works, huh? Well, too bad, we’re out of ideas. She’s still screaming, though.”
This is only tangentially related, but this weekend I was suddenly hyper-aware of the Teenage Dirtbags in my environment. It was delightful. They’re still wearing the cheap leather (or “leather”) jackets and dingy flannels and stupid boots of my youth, lo, these hundreds of years ago. And that one haircut that every third Dirtbag Boy has. Made my heart sing.
I SAW ONE ON MY WAY HOME. He was skulking along the sidewalk wearing a leather (“leather”?) jacket with patches on the back, wraparound headphones, and sunglasses.
those plastic baby things are hell and i had one for three days a few weeks ago. they basically condition you to be a struggling, frustrated teenage mother whose still trying to do their calculus homework. but it was also kind of hard to equate the stupid thing to a real baby, so i duct taped a sock to its speaker, cover it with blankets and put it in the closet. it was basically a giant scare tactic, like don’t have sex or else you’ll have one of these forever. i got a 36% on the project. oh well.
Yes, because you can definitely ignore/ put your baby on vibrate/silent. This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Its a joke, and if anything will cause kids to think having babies is easier than they thought before this came out. Stick to the fake crying babies. Or tell parents to raise their dang kids right.