Boobs, Brands, and Banality: How Everything Super Bowl Became Softcore

Thursday, February 13, 2025.

Gentle readers, Children of the Algorithm, gather 'round! Did you enjoy your Super Bowl?

The touchdowns, the beers, the commercials selling your greatest insecurities back to you?

Well, let's talk about the real MVP—breasts.

Novartis, our friendly pharmaceutical overlord, delivered a bouncing, cantaloupe-colored PSA: 'Get screened for breast cancer, you degenerates! You stare at boobs all day anyway!'

An excellent cause, yes.

But the delivery? Pure Cinemax After Dark. When health campaigns blur into clickbait, does the message land—or get lost in the cleavage?

Novartis wanted eyeballs, and it got them. “Your Attention, Please,” their 60-second Super Bowl debut, paraded breasts—cheerleaders, partygoers, a breastfeeding mom, Hailee Steinfeld, and Wanda Sykes—because breast health, apparently, requires a nipple montage.

Gail Horwood, Novartis's CMO, insisted it was thoughtful advocacy, directing viewers to YourAttentionPlease.com for screening info.

The ad industry applauded its “barrage of boobs” for stealing the show. But did it spark awareness—or just arousal?

The issue isn’t prudery; it’s monotony. Even the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic—supposedly a return to natural beauty—arrives vacuum-sealed in porn tropes. TikTok trends whisper that ‘demure’ and ‘traditional clothes’ top 2024’s porn searches. Innocence, it seems, is kinkier than kink.

And then there’s OnlyFans, the capitalist plot twist: monetize your own objectification.

Empowering? Maybe. But when does self-expression become self-commodification?

Platforms like OnlyFans promise autonomy but deliver a new kind of cage—one lined with likes, tips, and loneliness.

Dworkin’s prophecy from Pornography: Men Possessing Women—that porn collapses intimacy into transaction—feels chillingly fulfilled.

The porn aesthetic has devoured romance, marketing, even mayonnaise commercials (looking at you, Sidney Sweeney).

This isn’t a screed against sexiness; it’s a lament for its extinction. Our culture has traded desire’s mystery for its mechanics. Even rap, once rich with bravado and passion, now narrates intimacy like a transaction receipt.

So what’s left? Imagination. Not puritanism—creativity. Let’s reclaim the space between the lines. Sell me breast cancer screenings without the pole dance. Let breasts mean something beyond billboards for Big Pharma.

Final Thoughts

In the end, this isn't just about a Super Bowl ad, nor is it a crusade against sexiness or commerce.

It’s about how meaning erodes when everything, from awareness campaigns to intimacy, is flattened into spectacle.

The pornification of culture isn't simply a moral failure; it’s a symptom of a deeper sickness—one where human desires, from lust to love, are stripped of nuance and sold back to us as consumable content.

I remember speaking with Andrea Dworkin decades ago about this very thing. Her warnings were never about prudery. They were about power—how desire, unmoored from intimacy, becomes another tool for exploitation.

Yet, banning or moralizing won’t solve the problem. What we need is a cultural rebellion—an insistence on more dignity, ambiguity, subtlety, and humanity in how we see and sell ourselves.

We have become what we pretended to be: creatures of consumption, performers on platforms.

But perhaps, if we remember that we can pretend otherwise, we might just escape the algorithm’s grip.

Not with puritanism, but with dignity. Not with shame, but with authenticity.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.