Colour of bra — is breast cancer a joke?

Facebook updates are mostly weird, like, “It’s soooo green” or “ah, it’s wet”, or “stop it” etc. They are either too full of multiple meanings or totally meaningless to even the best of friends. I usually don’t spare a second thought for such messages. So, yesterday afternoon when I saw the status message of some of my (women) friends as “purple”, “black”, “pink”, I didn’t find anything unusual.

In the evening, when I reached my office, one of the woman colleagues told me to have a look at the Gmail status messages of women. There too I found colours! My first hunch was it’s some sort of weird intra-office joke. But I found the pattern even among my friends who aren’t my colleagues.

The question, “why these colours”, met with smile and laughter. And one of them said, “It’s the colour of the boyfriend’s underwear.” To which my quick retort, was “That’s some insight!” Only when I heard someone mention Facebook, I remembered what I had seen some hours before.

The women in the office were evidently having fun, seeing the puzzled look men’s faces. Apparently some guy made — what I later realised was — a horrendous mistake, by following suit and putting up his favourite colour as status message. Further embarrassment was avoided — he was told, it was meant only for girls and was advised to remove it. Girls were laughing out loud!

Meanwhile, I did what I do instinctively when I’m stumped for an answer — went straight to Google, with the key words: “women colour status message facebook gmail” O, there it was! Women all over the world were putting up the colour of their bra as status message! A bit more research revealed that the reason behind the meme was to create awareness about breast cancer.

And suddenly (from among men) a rejoicing cry of having cracked the colour code rent the air, with exclamations such as “we now know what it’s”, “the mystery is solved”, “the cat is out of the bag!” etc etc… I told the girls: “You can’t beat technology!” and I was sort of patting my back, quite pleased that I didn’t spend too much time wondering what the colourful status messages were all about.

And, suddenly the women who were laughing all this while suddenly went silent. One girl, who woke up too late, gave up plans to put up her colour the moment it was known what it was all about.

Awareness about bra or breast cancer?

So much for what happened. Now I have a few doubts, the answers for which may not be readily available on Google.

The ostensible reason for the campaign was “creating awareness about breast cancer”. The Facebook message, I am told, was on these lines: “Some fun is going on. Just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the girls have a color in their status.”

Who started this? No one has claimed responsibility! Many cancer research organization are distancing themselves from this.

I have serious doubts if this was a fast one pulled on the women by someone who knew the herd mentality of the cyberworld. And it looks like most women just fell for it. And it was stunning to see how women were willingly shedding inhibition and telling the world the colour of their bra.

Would they have behaved the same way, if someone had asked them — straight on their face — the colour of their bra with the aim of creating awareness about breast cancer?

Information diffuses very fast on the internet. It takes no time for it to spread far and wide across the globe. And this too did. To be fair to whoever started this meme, some organizations like Breast Cancer Foundation and American Cancer Society have been reporting a surge in visits to their websites, though there’s nothing concrete to link it to the bra colour meme, other than the timing. And some were mighty pleased that they got some contributions as well.

The basic idea was good: leveraging the power of the internet for a social cause and even including a bit of fun. But in all that, how could the word ‘cancer’ be missing? It would have made much sense if women were asked to write how best breast cancer could be fought.

In retrospect, I think, somewhere along the seriousness was lost.

There are some signs of backlash, it looks like. There were girls saying on Facebook that they won’t reveal the colour, and there is a group called “I Really Dont Care What Color Your Bra Is”, which was getting lots of fans.

There were reports in the media of how breast cancer victims didn’t know what they should put up. One woman who had undergone masectomy wrote: ‘None – in fact, I don’t even OWN one…. Nude, nothing…” etc etc…

This is not a joke, it’s heart-wrenching… I think a lot of us who had fun, should think again.

If at the end of it all, if women are now better informed about the disease, well and good. But if it was all about getting some cheap thrill — for men and women — and having fun, then it was a sheer (embarrassing?) waste of time, amounting to trivializing a very serious health issue.

Links:

Newsweek and Washington Post