Sex sells sick boobs

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Who doesn’t love to have an extra feel of their or their partner’s breasts to check them out for health and safety? It’s essential and if you’re not sure how to do it, have a look at this guide on how to cop an educated feel. Remember that this isn’t an invitation to grope.

To raise awareness, email and Facebook spammers across the world have begun to send around pink ribbon emails and chain mail to remind us all that this is not only a problem for one month of the year, and that early detection could save your breasts, or your life. One such campaign that facebookers are scrambling to get on the bandwagon with is the “I like it … ” thread. Check out the Facebook statuses of some of the women you know and you’ll see things like, “I like it anywhere”, “I like it on the floor”, “I like it in the boot” etc. What these women are talking about is not sex, but where they like their handbag.

The email has several versions but essentially it looks like this:

“Remember the game last year about what colour bra you were wearing at the moment? The purpose was to increase awareness of October Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It was a tremendous success and we had men wondering for days what was with the colours and it made it to the news. This year’s game has to do with your handbag, where we put our handbag the moment we get home for example “I like it on the sofa”, “I like it on the kitchen counter”, “I like it on the dresser” well u get the idea. Just put your answer as your status with nothing more than that and cut n paste this message and forward to all your FB female friends to their inbox. The bra game made it to the news. Let’s see how powerful we women really are!!! REMEMBER — DO NOT PUT YOUR ANSWER AS A REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE — PUT IT IN YOUR STATUS!!! PASS THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW “

The basic idea was to get people to ask you what your status was about so that you could tell them about breast cancer awareness.

This is a bit of a fail according to several women on Facebook for several reasons:

1) There is no link between handbags and breast cancer.

2) The innuendos in the status updates do little to encourage intellectual engagement with the issue of breast cancer, and how we can make a difference or check ourselves. They focus on women’s sexuality. Breast cancer might involve breasts, but it’s not about sex.

3) Not all women have a handbag, or put it in a consistent place, or would like to make up a place to sound sexy.

Basically it’s an example of using sex, or sexual innuendos, to get a focus on breast cancer. Is it a fail? I’m not sure. Is it offensive? Certainly for many women. So the question is whether we’re willing to let sex sell sick boobs? Is that the best we can come up with? I don’t think so.

Perhaps more people are thinking about breast cancer now … but perhaps they are just thinking about where you like it.

*Thank you to Bianca Camminga for this great title