BoobQuake goes viral, will Brainquake follow?

Yesterday I was cleaning up my apartment and ran across an article in the LA Times, featuring a scantily clad Ojai environmentalist.

“It’s OK for children to play video games where they are killing each other, and it’s patriotic to murder people in a war. But women’s breasts in public? You better watch out!” (LA Times)

I’m not about to parade down the street doing ‘The Full Monty‘. But it does strike me as weird: why is violence so prevalent in our media, but the human body so taboo?

(One example: people are way too uptight about public breastfeeding in the ‘1st World’.) If an alien observer from outer space were to base its evaluation of humanity on our broadcast media, it’d assume we spend more time killing each other than having sex.

This morning I woke up, checked my mail, and clicked through a few links. Woah! In response to an Iranian cleric’s comments:

Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes”…”What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” (Chicago Tribune)

A college student (Jennifer McCreight / Blaghag)/ had created a humorous ‘BoobQuake’ Facebook Group that’s attracted over 150,000 supporters- a number climbing fast, thanks to tools such as Twitter. (So fast in fact that she’s been taken aback by all the attention.) So is all the enthusiasm about the protest? Or do people just enjoy a little exposure?

I like ‘BoobQuake’ as a humorous protest, but think the media hype has gotten pretty frenzied.

In Phnom Penh, where I live, there was recently a rally against short skirts.
It’s great to ‘stick it to the man’ when he is thousands of miles away in another country and legal system. But this is very clearly a cross-cultural response via a different language, country and perspective. Iranian women wearing a tank top in public? They’ll get thrown in jail. Women participants in the developing world/traditional societies would risk personal violence and imprisonment, or worse.

An alternate suggestion is that women display their credentials rather than their skin, ‘BrainQuake‘.   BrainQuake’s originator (Negar Mottahedeh / The Negarponti files) has exchanged polite correspondence with BoobQuake and even pointed out that most pundits are ignoring the pseudoscience critique that inspired the protest.

Boobquake will make for fun pop activism; I’d wager BrainQuake has a greater chance for longer term impact. In addition to bare skin, how about bringing some brains to bear on the issue as well?

Both events are tomorrow, Monday, April 26th. It’ll make an interesting start to the week.

Linkage: BoobQuake, BrainQuake.

Tags: cambodia,boobquake,brainquake,iran

(Picture by Heng Chivoan, Phnom Penh Post. Illustrations from BoobQuake / BrainQuake sites.)