Analysis of Baby-Boom Promoting Billboards in Iran
289ARE FLOWERS metaphor. The metaphor highlights the significance of the
number of constituting elements in obtaining satisfactory results.
Moreover, spring and having a large family are both assumed to cause
happiness. Spring is associated with happiness for Iranians because it is
the start of the New Year and people typically celebrate the end of New
Year’s holidays by going on picnic with their families. In the billboard,
both causes of happiness are pictorially represented and blended into a
single image to demonstrate an ideal happiness one could experience. The
blue sky, the grass, and the watermelon are representing elements of the
SPRING domain manifested pictorially in the billboard. Happiness (the
balloons and the smiling faces) is also represented in the picture via PART
FOR WHOLE conceptual metonymy. The billboard invites the interpretation
that small families lack this happiness since they are not enough in number
to achieve it.
Figure 1. An Iranian family going on a spring picnic on a tandem bicycle.
Two other points in connection with the billboard are: First, the mother
is not included in the picture. What seems to be the reason is that religious
conservatives in the government have banned women’s bicycling, considering
it an un-Islamic act (www.usatoday30.usatoday.com 28/06/2007), though
the girl in the picture is permitted to peddle since she is prepubescent.
Second, in the picture, there are four boys and only one girl, which might
represent the cultural preference of Iranians to have boys rather than girls
(www.ghatreh.com 05/01/2016). The priority given to boys can be seen in
some families that keep reproducing in the hope of having a boy. Third,
the father of the family is pictured as young and not middle-aged. It