I am really unsure what I think about Boobiethon '06. If you're not familiar, this is a campaign for bloggers to send in pictures of their breasts to the main Boobiethon site, where people can have a peek for a $50 donation to the Susan G. Komen fund for Breast Cancer research.
Once, I noticed that a male friend always uses breast cancer stamps. I asked him about it and he said "I like breasts and want to help them out." I liked that. And it does have a great deal of marketing appeal.
I seem to recall reading at some point that animal rights charities don't like it that their donations fall when they don't put the cutest possible endangered animals on their brochures. I guess that's how I'm feeling about the breast campaign. Are the cuter parts of us really that much more worth saving?
Now, even though the fuzzy tiger is raising money, lots of animals are benefiting, and I'm sure that donations to breast cancer specific charities will eventually benefit people suffering from all kinds of cancers. If nothing else, finding a cure for breast cancer has to help at least somewhat in finding cures for other types. And Breast Cancer is one of the most common types of cancer. It's a perfectly good thing to raise money for breast cancer research, though as Think Before you Pink points out, a lot of companies do things like have $500,000 marketing campaigns to tell people they donated $300,000 to breast cancer research.
But still, connecting the sexiness to the cancer bugs me.
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2 comments:
If you think we're only connecting "sexy to cancer", you honestly haven't looked through the site enough to go through the pink and survivor galleries. They are the true reason we're there and go back every year.
We stumbled across this way to raise money in 2002 so we made sure the funds went to the right place, and have returned our 5th 'Thon and counting to do it again. Would it be better we didn't raise $26K and counting? Or should we continue something that obviously works?
I, for one, am glad we don't sit around and complaining -- we just go do.
Thanks for your comments and input on the matter.
I don't doubt, and indeed never doubted that your motives are basically pure.
And I never said that connecting sexiness to cancer was all you did. As I said in my post, raising money for cancer research is a good thing.
I'm gathering from the defensive tone of your post that you've gotten a lot of criticism and I'm sorry that you feel attacked.
My post was not intended as an attack and indeed presented reasons why even people who are less thrilled with your tactics might support you.
Again, I don't have anything against you. Even having written about it, I remain unsure what I think about it.
But I'm guessing other people are giving you much more grief and I'm sorry for that because I know you're trying to do something good.
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