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"Save the Boobs" ? it's a breast cancer public service announcement, so you can't complain?

First, here's the PSA:

And here's a "making of" background video:

Here's Dan Neil writing about it in the L.A. Times:

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and a new crop of public service announcements leverage male lechery to an astonishing degree. The latest and greatest is a spot called "Save the Boobs," from the Rethink Breast Cancer charity...

If this were a Budweiser commercial, the bluestockings, psalm singers and family focusers would be going completely mental, but in this case the morals police have no grounds to object unless they want to come off as somehow pro-breast cancer.

No grounds? If you have one good cause, it's supposed to be perfectly okay to undercut other causes? And why does Neil imagine the opposition to sexist advertising as coming only from bluestockings, psalm singers and family focusers? Is feminism in such deep eclipse?

In recent years, the increasing frankness of breast cancer PSAs has been a bright spot of adult sensibility in what is Americans' generally neurotic relationship to the female anatomy....

Well, I would have thought that feminist critique is adult and is (or at least can be) non-neurotic. But Neil does get around to talking about feminism:

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.

So it escapes the misogyny charge because it's got a good cause or because it's a spoof? Those are 2 different things. And yet, as a matter of feminism, I don't think either good cause or spoof gets you off the hook.

Full post as published by Althouse on September 25, 2009 (boomark / email).