Did you know about that amazing viral campaign that raised awareness about breast cancer? Of course you did. If you are a Facebook user, then you probably noticed a curious phenomenon last week. Rather mysteriously, women were updating their status with colors. There was beige, lots of black, red, some purple and pink, even stripes. Nothing else, just colors. The point of this was to raise awareness about breast cancer. Now let that sink in. The point of this exercise was to raise awareness about breast cancer by women sharing what color bra they were wearing that day. What? You didn’t know that was actually about something serious? Yeah, well, join the fucking club.
This was such an obvious educational campaign FAILURE, let me count the ways An educational campaign can’t lay claim to raising awareness if no one knows what the campaign was about or even that a campaign was underway. Most people I know thought this was a joke. And to a certain extent it was. The message that I got on Facebook was this, “Some fun is going on.... just 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. See how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status.” The problem was, is and remains that most people were not in on the joke. Women were changing their status and friends were reading them without necessarily making the connection to breast cancer. The “campaign” (I use that term loosely here) didn’t provide enough context for people to make that leap from beige (or pink or purple) to breast cancer awareness.
I ‘m not criticizing the campaign for trying to be different, fun or flirty. Or that even guys got into the act. I wasn’t concerned about women objectifying themselves by sharing the color of their bra. My issue was with the lack of any genuine awareness-raising or educating about breast cancer. As a next step, the campaign could have asked women to post statistics about the prevalence of breast cancer or steps on how to conduct a self-breast examination. Organizers of the campaign, whoever they were, could have suggested that women follow-up with blog posts explaining risk factors for breast cancer or first–person narratives from breast cancer fighters and survivors. In fact, among all these status updates the words “breast cancer” didn’t appear. Not once. And so we lost a major opportunity to educate millions of people, especially young women, about a disease that will strike 1 in 8 women over the course of her lifetime, including my best friend’s mom who died from complications due to breast cancer in 2008.
Another major failure of the campaign was raised in this post, by WHYMOMMY. How many people stopped to think about the fact that many women could not participate because they longer wore a bra, because of breast cancer? In trying to raise awareness about breast cancer the campaign managed to isolate and silence the very people who are MOST impacted by this disease. The campaign cannot claim to stand in solidarity with breast cancer fighters and survivors, if the effect was to do so at their expense, further marginalizing them and adding to the tremendous stigma that still surrounds the disease.
I spend a lot of time thinking about cancer. Since my Mom was diagnosed fourteen months ago, not a day goes by that I don’t think about cancer, the 12 million people around the world that will be diagnosed with it this year or what I can do to fight it. But if we are going to really educate people about breast cancer, this bra campaign isn’t going to get us there. We need information, resources, and services. Otherwise, it’s just a joke that most of us aren’t in on.
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