They assumed that you'd be watching for more than 30 seconds...
A public service announcement lurking behind the facade of an erotic video was counting on men to come for the porn, but stay for the tutorial on breast cancer. A video, titled "Latin Boobs," was uploaded to PornHub last October for breast cancer awareness month by the advertising firm DDB Bolivia on behalf of the Alcázar Institute of Gynecology and Reproductive Medicine in Bolivia. The video was posted to DDB's Vimeo channel earlier this week.
The Spanish-language video starts out with a 30-second lead-in set to a porn-tastic soundtrack before a message flashes on the screen reading: "This is not an erotic video. This is a tutorial on how to perform a breast cancer examination." A voiceover then walks viewers through the steps of a breast examination, using the same footage, to check for signs and symptoms that would warrant a visit to your doctor.
Warning: The video below contains images that are not safe for work.
The campaign is obviously targeted at PornHub's massive male audience -- it's the world's third-largest porn website with nearly 80 billion video views last year.
The video takes a pretty risque approach, and as Mic notes, many in the breast cancer community object to such highly sexualized attempts to raise awareness of the disease.
HuffPost blogger Jessica Holmes pointed out in 2012 that "Cancerous breasts threaten idealized femininity and the eroticization of the female body, and these 'awareness' campaigns are no different from the over-sexualized and fetishized imagery in mainstream culture, which reduces a woman's value to her body parts."
Sian Ferguson at Everyday Feminism has called for a re-evaluation of such campaigns, arguing that they are also gender essentialist and misrepresent the reality of a disease that killed nearly 40,000 American women in 2013.
"We should not simply be aware that cancer exists," she writes, "we need to know more about who it effects [sic] and how we can help them."
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