Celebrating Boobs Might Not be the Best Way to Hype Breast Cancer Awareness

Breasts. If any alien race landed here on earth and witnessed our obsession with breasts, all they'd have to do to take over our world would be to morph into an army on bikini-clad women sporting boobs the size of cantaloupes to peacefully subdue us.

Perhaps that's why marketers have leveraged that very same obsession to sell stuff. The bigger the boob, the bigger the sell. So it's not surprising that when breasts (or breast-related items) are the "product" itself, boobs of all shapes, sizes, color and jiggle factor are trotted out. Just look at any breast cancer campaign. Tracy Clark-Flory did and she didn't like what she saw. Not one bit.

In an article for Salon, she lists several recent breast cancer awareness campaigns but the one that enraged her the most was the recent I Heart Boobies bracelet campaign which resulted in kids wearing the bracelets to school and administrators banning them.

Making her disdain for this sort of approach to breast cancer awareness, Clark-Flory wrote, "When death is truly knocking at your door - and I'm not talking about early, uncertain cases - most aren't thinking about how much they love their breasts, they're thinking about how much they love not being dead. They're thinking: Chop those things off, now. Women subject themselves to the pain of chemo and elect to watch their hair fall out; they do this not to save their precious secondary sexual characteristics, but rather to live another day, because it's worth it, breasts or no breasts."

What's your take? Has the obsession with breasts clouded the issue? Devalued it? Shifted focus from the real issue? From any issue where breasts are used to sell a product or service? Or are we helplessly destined to bounce a pair of juicy 34DDD's atop a rail-thin, bikini-clad, impossibly hot model every time we want to call attention to something?