women minds

I’m stunned by people’s support of the recent PSA campaign “Save the Boobs” sponsored by the Rethink Breast Cancer. (Side note: on YouTube this Breast Cancer PSA is limited to viewers 18 or older but you can also view it here.) Why do we need to objectify women to make breast cancer important to a younger generation of men (and women)? Is this really the most successful way to communicate to young men? Just look at the number of posts in the comments section on the YouTube page for “Save the Boobs” that say the following or something similar:

she has a great ass, and fantastic boobs, sooo hot!!!

why is 1 tit jiggling when she walks?

I’d give a kidney to fuck those titties.

I don’t have a sense the general public is getting the message. And what IS the message?

We don’t need to propagate a stereotype in order to get the attention of men, or put women into the male gaze in order to appeal to them.  In Dan Neil’s Los Angeles Times article he writes:

Feminist film theory has a name for the camera’s eye here: The “male gaze,” which is to say, the camera’s view is that of the male spectator and unseen protagonist regarding the female as an object (cf. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”). This is the camera’s-eye of pornography and it’s inherently misogynistic. The “Save the Boobs” spot spoofs the male gaze and turns it into something positive.

In addition to Dan Neil’s seriously stunted analysis of the male gaze and feminist theory, the PSA doesn’t spoof the male gaze because it doesn’t put power back in the control of women. There is nothing positive about watching men and women respond to a sexualized woman with the same old stereotypical sexist and misogynist clichés we’ve all seen before.

Does this get a younger generation interested in Breast Cancer awareness — really?