Ok so this has been bumping around my head for some time as I’ve tried to find the words as to why it upsets me. One of the recent Autism Speaks commercials seems fine on the surface, but the way it is said and the imagery that goes along with it is...not ok (though that is no surprise coming from AS).
I can’t find any images of it, but it was the one with with the wooden boy flapping like a bird in the middle of a forest with coocoo birds in the background, then there’s a clip of a real boy going up steps to his home. If I remember it correctly, the transcript of the commercial is “There once was a boy who did the same thing over and over again. One day he learned he had autism. He got help and slowly learned how to live with it better.”
These sentences on their own are fine, but together have negative implications. The addition of the middle sentence makes it sound like he has some kind of dangerous disease that needs to be treated.
The coocoo birds in the background are behaving in ways reminiscent of stimming. On its own, that would be fine, but the history of the word coocoo makes it seem like stimming is something you would have to be crazy to do. At the same time that these birds are on screen, the first sentence is spoken which also makes it seem like enjoying repetition is also a crazy thing. In this first segment the boy looks wooden, almost like a puppet. At the end commercial, the wooden boy becomes a real boy, like Pinocchio. Makes it seem like they don’t think people with autism are actual people until they’ve pulled their strings enough to behave like a “normal” person. With the boy starting in the forest and then going home at the end, it has the narrative of “bring my baby back.”
