A New Zealand-based website has been the source of some controversy lately. NZgirl.com.nz has been running a breast-cancer-awareness campaign that they refer to as the 'Lovely Pair' campaign, in which readers are invited to upload pictures of their breasts on the site in order to raise money for charity. A breast-a-thon if you will. The site is claiming that they will donate $1000 to breast-cancer research for every fifty pairs of breasts uploaded.
And some people aren't happy about it, like breast-cancer survivor Helena McAlpine. "Are they just driving traffic to their website? Yes, of course they are. It's a marketing campaign more than anything," she says.
Some of the pictures have been appropriated by porn sites, and some breast-cancer sufferers, like blogger Kylie Richardson, have been flat-out insulted. She says, "The tagline, 'I've got a lovely pair' or whatever, it's slightly insensitive to those of us that don't have a pair at all. There's plenty of young women out there with breast cancer who have one or no boobs. Trying to promote breast cancer by showing off a heap of lovely pairs is a bit insensitive."
On the flip side, Editor Tee Twyford, proud of the positive feedback from breast-cancer survivors, stated in an editorial that "the strategy behind this was centered on breasts still being a very controversial topic in a fairly conservative country."
The campaign, which has raised a little more than $3000 thus far, is scheduled to run until Christmas, hopefully by which time, whether you're for or against the campaign, a lot more donations will have been generated to fight a terrible disease.
