Selling your body is finally legal. And advertisers really want yours.

No longer satisfied with pasting brand names across the canvas of this country like a juvenile delinquent with his first can of spray paint, advertisers are continually looking for new surfaces to attach their logo. And no blank space is off limits, even the belly of a pregnant woman.

About two weeks ago, the Associated Press reported a woman sold the rights to broadcast the live birth of her daughter to a California-based Web-hosting company. Throughout the nine months of her pregnancy, the woman auctioned off her swollen-belly space to various bidders augmenting her bank account as her stomach did some growing of its own. And she's not alone.

In the past year www.goldenpalace.com has donned its logo on the growing bellies of a slew of women during their pregnancies, spent thousands of dollars getting logos between the breasts of scantily clad women, and in one case paid a woman $15,100 to actually name her child "goldenpalace.com."

A Nebraska man earned $37,000 for wearing a corporate logo on his forehead for a month and a Pennsylvania woman leased the space on her infant's clothing on eBay for $1,000 a month. Human billboards even trampled the streets of State College recently, as a local promotion company paid students $25 an hour to tout bar specials on their foreheads and cheeks in February.

After hundreds of years and millions of ads done the traditional way -- through magazines, television, radio and billboards -- advertisers are starting to think getting under our skin isn't enough. Now they want to get on it.

And the line to become a human billboard gets longer every day. But it's only natural, right? The body is just one more place for advertisers to get their messages out. We skim through them in magazines and we drown them with channel surfing on television. We are conditioned to ignore ads in almost every format available.

But we'll always look at cleavage, or at that pregnant woman's bulging belly. And it's pretty hard to ignore a forehead. So that's where ads will end up.

A marketer's job is to cut through the clutter -- a task equivalent to getting a stranger's attention from across a crowded Beaver Stadium -- in a world where consumers are bathing in a sea of an estimated 3,000 branded messages each day.

So they get the average Joe to write the proverbial "Eat at Joe's" on his forehead. And shock value has it working, at least for now. But as the novelty wears off so will the price tag, and human billboards could be thought of as bigger sellouts than a home football game.

But if people-vertising doesn't die, ad-stitutes will flourish. And the advertisers' dream will turn into society's nightmare; where people will be judged by the logo on their skin, or at least they'll be defined by it.

Isn't it enough that the clothes we wear, cars we drive, sunglasses we squint through and purses we carry already have more logos on them than a NASCAR race?

Isn't it enough that our football team won the Orange Bowl, not the FedEx Orange Bowl?

Apparently not for some people. Corporation culture guides us to "experience" coffee at Starbucks instead of just drinking it at UniMart. Slogans have leaked into our lexicon and jingles loop constantly. And brand names are a big player in the status game, allowing us to define who is stylish, rich and cool based on what they wear and drive just like our junior high attire divvied up the cafeteria into social sects.

There are enough hurdles in the path of being seen for what you really are as it is. Having a logo tattooed on your forehead will just make things worse.

I'm not sure if the walking billboards have any shame for selling their bodies even if it is legal, or if they are at all embarrassed that when people look into their eyes they also see drink specials.

But if they are blushing, at least they can hide it under that ad.