‘Motorboating’ For Breast Cancer Donations: Has Breast Cancer Awareness Become Over-Sexualized? [VIDEOS]
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and every year those impacted by the disease try to find new, innovative ways to disseminate information about it and raise resources to find a cure. This year, Simple Pickup — a YouTube channel devoted to showing men how to flirt with women — devoted one of its videos to raising money for breast cancer research... by “motorboating” women on the beach.
“Today, we’re working to save some boobies,” they said.
The men, followed by a camera, promised to donate $20 to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation for each woman who allowed them to motorboat her. They managed to motorboat 104 women, raising over $2,000 dollars for breast cancer research. It’s no surprise that the video received over three million views, as the women asked braced themselves and grimaced through. After all, it was for charity.
“That was more than a motorboat. That looked like a yacht to me!” screamed one onlooker.
Motorboating is a colloquial term for “the placement of one’s face, specifically the mouth, into the area between a well-endowed woman’s breasts, followed by a rapid shaking of the face in a side-to-side motion accompanied by yelling. The resulting sound that is created sounds similar to an outboard boat motor.” The behavior is flirtatious in nature, and not typically done between random strangers, which is probably what makes Simple Pickup’s video so entertaining to watch. But does it go too far?
Breast cancer awareness campaigns using phrases like “Save Second Base,” “I Heart Boobies,” and “Save the Ta-Tas” have been criticized for emphasizing the sexuality and femininity of breasts rather than the value of the women attached to them. A 2012 article in the Harvard Crimson raised the question “Save the boobies, or the woman?” In it, the author says that deducing breast cancer awareness to a conversation about saving certain body parts for sexual pleasure places humor on a disease that is very serious — humor that we don’t place on other cancers.
“There is nothing sexual about someone dying of breast cancer,” the author wrote. “There is only horror and sickness, and to suggest that the purpose of finding a cure for this disease is to restore the body’s ability to please someone else, even facetiously, reduces the dying person to a body and makes a cruel joke of their pain.”
So maybe Simple Pickup’s approach wasn’t the best, but they were able to raise over $2,000 for breast cancer research… that will be done by doctors and scientists who do, in fact, care about saving women’s lives.
View the actual motorboating footage and a video of Simple Pickup making good on their promise below: