Breast-vertising? Huh?
Gender stereotypes and using breasts (and breast cancer!) to market products....
We live in a culture that reveres youth and beauty, so it should come as no surprise that women are especially vulnerable to advertisements promising that their products will keep them forever young and forever desirable. The companies that manufacture the very beauty products that may be contributing to spikes in breast cancer rates among younger women, are also reinforcing gendered stereotypes.
Look at the Oreck Clean for the Cure campaign. A single dollar from each purchase of one vacuum model was donated to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Then there is the Kitchenaid Cook for the Cure campaign. The idea is that you host a dinner party where you invite your friends and have them make a donation to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. Kitchenaid has also put out a line of pink kitchen appliances in alliance with their campaign including blenders, whisks, food processers and mixers. The idea of domesticity is enforced by campaigns geared towards white, middle to upper class women. Just when we thought things were progressing from the house wife whose only responsibilities were cooking, cleaning and looking after the children, we are slapped in the face with campaigns aimed at ‘women’s work’. Though the intention of these campaigns is to bring breast cancer into the public, their tactic of doing so is still stale and archaic.
Breasts have become entirely mainstream in advertising. Breasts sell everything from cars to furniture to hair dye. Since breasts are constantly associated with sex, “we are unable to conceive of anything breast-related as truly free from sexual overtones.”[1] The issue here then, is that breasts are not being used in the one avenue of advertising where they rightfully should be—breast cancer cause marketing. It seems like a simple enough tactic, but these campaigns do not directly address breast self-exams or mammogram.
By creating a socially conscious image through pink-ribbon campaigns and by neglecting to tackle things like breast self-exams, these companies are undermining breast cancer and exploiting women’s bodies for profit. Female consumers are commanded to both indulge in endless consumption and employ self-control in denying desires. Susan Bordo notes that, in consumer capitalism, tension exists as individuals are required to both consume endlessly and deny desires to consume in order to produce. She further notes that of key importance to the continuation of the capitalist system is the masking of this contradiction, which is accomplished through advertising that demands we can “have it all.”[2]
At the end of the day, no matter how socially conscious a company may appear to be, the ultimate goal is to move product even if it is at the expense of a woman’s health and body.
[1]“Double Life: Everyone Wants to See your Breasts – Until your Baby Needs Them.” Lisa Moricoli Latham. From Bitchfest. Ed. Lisa Jewvis and Andi Zeisler. [2] Bordo, Susan. “Reading the Slender Body”. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1993/2003: 185-212
