F*ck Cancer Riffs on the Kama Sutra for Skin Health
A nonprofit battling skin cancer wants you to try every Kama Sutra position with your partner—and it produced a set of NSFW info-cards as part of an awareness initiative called "Serious Foreplay."
Melanoma is the deadliest form of the disease, but most people don't take the time to check for questionable moles. This campaign encourages couples to scan each other's skin before more intimate activity unfolds.
Card titles include "Woman on Top of Her Health," "69-Second Scan" and "Love Your Skin Lotus." Basically, each riffs on a Kama Sutra position to make skin scans more thorough (and enjoyable, presumably).
The campaign also includes short films that bring viewers into the bedroom while educating about the "ABCDEs of Moles."
The work will run across social and through digital buys on adult education, lifestyle and wellness sites.
The organization behind the campaign, F*ck Cancer (asterisk ours) has also partnered with sex-positive influencers and experts on Instagram. These include Dr. Carlton Thomas, a queer health advocate, and Danielle Bezalel, producer and host of the podcast Sex Ed with DB.
The effort factored in recent studies that show partner-aided skin scans increase early detection of melanomas.
"At F*ck Cancer, we believe it's important to talk about the things that people don't always want to talk about, whether that's intimacy or cancer," says Hanna Christianson, vice president of programs and operations. "'Serious Foreplay' not only grabs attention, it also encourages people to be active rather than passive when it comes to their cancer risk."
The goal, says Christianson, is to make "Serious Foreplay" more than an ad campaign.
"Dermatologists should recommend this to their patients," she says. "It should be as acceptable as being told to check your breasts or your testicles. Our goal is for dermatologists to have packs of 'Kamole Sutra' cards on hand and to give them out just as they would any other piece of sound medical advice.”
A copywriter at ad shop The Variable developed the concept after her partner's mole turned out to be melanoma.
"We saw an opportunity to take the intimacy shared between couples and turn that into an opportunity to save lives—all in a way that is provocative, encourages openness, and transforms a potentially mundane, and overlooked, health screening into, well, sex," says Joe Parrish, agency co-founder and chief creative officer.
"And we know for a fact that the campaign has worked for at least one other person already—one of our own employees whose wife happened to notice an odd-looking spot on his skin," says Parrish. "As a result, he visited a doctor and had the irregularity removed. We didn't ask too many details on how she found the spot."
