About

Booberday is a Saturday photo event that involves posting pictures of women's breasts for breast cancer awareness. It was inspired by the 4chan posting event known as "Caturday", in which pictures of cats are dumped into a thread in celebration of Saturdays.

Origin

Booberday was founded by Google user Raleigh B^[1] on the social networking site Google+ in a post titled "Its officially BOOBERDAY!!!!"^[2] from September 3, 2011. The post included an attached image of a shirtless teenage boy.

Spread

The domain booberday.com^[5] was registered the same day Raleigh B posted the first Booberday image on September 3rd, 2011. The site's tagline reads "Raising awareness, creating controversy…
and of course, disrupting Caturday!" Tech blogger Robert Scoble^[4] posted a Booberday image on his Google+ page on September 10th, 2011. As of September 16th, 2011, Scoble is the 9th most followed person on Google+ with 128,431 followers.

Controversy

Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd, criticized the campaign in a post on Google+^[6] on September 11th, 2011.

The frustrating thing about the "Save the Boobies" campaign and similar things (like the "Booberday" meme going around G+) is that they get it exactly backward. Often, the point of breast cancer treatment is to destroy some or all of the boobies in order to save the woman.

Saying that we should work to cure this disease because it threatens breasts is really upsetting. For starters, it suggests that women are worth saving because they're attached to breasts, rather than the other way around. But worse, it tells any woman who's had a mastectomy to try to save her life that she's lost the thing that made people care about her survival. What a punch in the stomach.

On September 13th, 2011, Jezebel^[3] published an article about the controversy surrounding the fad, and cited the Scoble post as one of the first instances to inspire a backlash. The article referenced the bra status updates fad as another breast cancer related social networking meme:

As we've learned from previous social networking memes, mentioning breast cancer means you can post all the silly and smutty content you want and pretend you're just a sensitive guy who's concerned about ladies' health.

External References