For Our Women

The video above is from the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation. Part of their “Our Women” campaign, it’s intended to get people to convince the women in their lives to get screened for breast cancer. It features several prominent New Zealanders, along with a lot of people who I don’t recognise and, of course, foreigners probably won’t recognise any of them. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the message of the video doesn’t depend on knowing who the people are.

The music in the video is a re-make of “Not Given Lightly” by Chris Knox, which includes many New Zealand singers. The song is available for purchase through iTunes, with the artist credited as “For Our Women”, which is also the title of the video.

I think the video is highly effective, but I’m a sucker for appeals to emotion, so that’s not surprising. But I also like the idea of asking people to ask the women in their lives to get screened. After all, we all have women in our lives who we love and don’t want to lose.

One thing I wasn’t fond of was that the direct way to share the video on Facebook was to sign in through your account, then it calculated the women among your friends list so you could send the video to them. However noble the ideal, I just don’t believe in sending out what amounts to spam.

Nevertheless, I hope a lot of women will see the video and be motivated to act, or, if not them, that others will convince the women in their lives to do so. So, c’mon, ladies: Go get "the girls" checked—we're not ready to be without you!