Burn Your Bra Color Status Updates

I was wondering why, starting on about Thursday, my Facebook friends were posting words like "black," "hot pink," and "beige" as their statuses.  Then I got the mass message: "Cancer awareness: Write the color of your bra in your status.  Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls, no men .... It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status."

I started to sneak a peek under my own shirt, but then the radical feminist analysis of the message ran through my head.  Let's break this message down.

1. Write just the color, nothing else.  Okay, I'm sure that anyone with even a smidge of Internet savvy can type "why is everyone posting colors as their statuses?" into a search engine.

2.  Send this on to ONLY girls, no men.  Girls versus men--hmm, let's look at this dichotomy.  Of course, bras and such fripperies are hopelessly girlie secrets that men can only ogle. You know, secret ladies' business, the reason we love being girls, blah blah blah femininity b.s.  One can just hear the chorus of tittering voices talking about things that men will never understand, you know, because they're so macho and insensitive.  And, of course, we're assuming that only girls wear bras, and all girls wear bras.  But then, a viral campaign based on lite exhibitionism for the virtual male gaze isn't really going to take the complexities of gender into account.

3. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status.  Again with the girls and men.  Do I want my adult male acquaintances to ponder what I'm wearing on my underage chest? The whole campaign reeks of voyeurism and the American obsession with breasts.

I understand that at least in its inception, the message was meant to raise breast cancer awareness.  As the granddaughter, friend and cousin of breast cancer survivors, I understand the dire need for awareness of breast health.  Yet the bra color campaign smacks of initiatives like "Save the Ta-Tas," which advocate ending breast cancer on the basis of "boobies are sexy and hilarious" rather than "women's lives are at stake."  Sadly, sexy "awareness" campaigns are the most popular and successful--even the sluggish, fusty Washington Post picked up on the bra trend in a Saturday Style piece.  One needs only to check out your friends' current status messages to see how "aware" they are, and how successful the campaign was.

More than anything, this campaign encourages snickering soft-core femininity, not awareness of the severity of cancer.  We've gone from throwing bras in a Freedom Trash Can at the Miss America pageant in 1968 (the place where that pesky bra-burner rumor got started) to virtually informing the world about our own.

How about some real awareness: according to the American Cancer Society, 40,000 women die from breast cancer annually. Carcinogen levels  in our air and water are strongly correlated with causing cancer. All women have a one in eight lifetime risk for breast cancer.

Put that in your status message.