Chicagoland continues to get upset about billboards. First there was that innocuous divorce-lawyer ad. Now it’s this spa billboard. (Click the photo to enlarge.) The Tribune published a whole story, but all you really need are the quotes from local women and the spa owner. Woman: “I was shocked. I was offended as a woman, angered as a mother and embarrassed as a resident of Glenview.” Spa owner: “No, I will not bring it down.” Woman: “I’d like for them to replace it with another ad.” Spa owner: “I will leave it up.” Woman: “I’m a mother, a wife, a member of the PTA, and this is an affront to everything I work for and try to instill in my children.” Spa owner: “I don’t want to sound like a chauvinistic pig, but this is a man’s world.” Woman: “It doesn’t represent us as people whose beauty emanates from within.” Spa owner: “You don’t like what we sell? Goodbye. Good luck. Go somewhere else.” Woman: “It demonstrates that there’s a set of values they support that are the antithesis of my values.” Spa owner: “My next billboard is going to be of a 300-pound woman and it will say, ‘Could you help me please?’ Then everyone would be after me saying, ‘My son is traumatized because you showed me a fat woman.’ You can never win.”

—Posted by Tim Nudd