What’s with this bra colour business?
There’s a meme doing the rounds on Facebook, ostensibly to spread awareness on breast cancer. I have received at least 5 messages since Friday, asking me to put up the colour of my bra as my status message. Forgive me if I am being conservative or orthodox, but I would rather not lend fodder to the already overactive imagination of my male friends on FB, by telling them what colour I wear.
That apart, how exactly does revealing the colour contribute to awareness on breast cancer? The bra is an essential garment, of course! It gives shape to the body and is worn for purely practical reasons. But the rest of the hoopla surrounding it is largely social in nature. The bra, at one point, symbolized oppression and a denial of rights to women. The corset, worn during the better part of the 18th and 19th Century, was so restrictive that women could not even bend to pick something up from the ground. The famous and violent bra-burning campaigns that defined early 20th Century feminism were a fallout of this social conditioning that the bra was oppressive. We have come a long way from that point. But, I still fail to see the connection between bra and cancer.
This campaign is a classic example of how modern day social media is being misused for pointless and completely over-the-top campaigns like this one. Check out this post by Kiran Manral. Food for thought, this! How do I know this is not, as Kiran puts it, “some clever chap’s great idea to get his five minutes of voyeuristic joy imagining women of different sizes and shapes in different coloured bras?” on the whole, I find this entire campaign pure, unadulterated crap! I will probably get a lot of brickbats for saying this, but I find that women who blindly follow the trend, and men too although not in this case, are refusing to use their brains to ask why they are doing something. Just why should I reveal something as personal as the colour of my undergarments just because some random person tells me to? I don’t get it at all! If you do, please feel free to enlighten me!
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9 Comments
vishvak saen
ah yes.some of us had a fight over this on facebook.stupid stupid thing. and after the fight with the girls got bad some guys started to put a stupid status msg to mock them (urging male-kind to come together and shed inhibitions in an effort to raise awarness on the malaise that plagues our very basic functionality. Join us on the fly-overs closest to your homes, 11-45 P.M. tonight as we Streak to Spread Awarness on PROSTATE CANCER- PLEASE CHANGE UR STATUS TO THE NAME OF THE NEAREST FLYOVER !!!)..imagine my surprise when many guys took this to be real did the cycle thing.i hope no one came to the flyovers..and please dont even label this feminism.some really gross jokes came out over this bra thingy.one girl dint update.so another guy asked dont you wear bra and stuff.problem is loads of family on fb too.anyways bottom line stupid.excuse lenght.free
Nu
What you say is right…but there is one point I want to make..the guy who want that 5 mins of fun can imagine any female even if there are no status messages put across…
logically yes..by putting color as status message there is no awareness being spread but when you are pinged by your friend or a random person to put the color message..the reason is given with that…BREAST CANCER AWARENESS…may be this is kind of reminder to the ladies that they need to get themselves checked up regular…
I mean it’s fine that someone doesn’t want to put the status message but the reminder has been given..that’s the point !
Suki
I would have agreed with you and Kiran, but I realized something after Kiran’s post. Thanks to the utter silliness of this “campaign” and the buzz it’s generated, a lot of us are being pushed into reading up about breast cancer awareness. The pink ribbon, like the red ribbon and purple ribbon and rainbow ribbon, has become too run-of-the-mill to work effectively now.
indianhomemaker
Amrutha in India we don’t openly talk about things like under garments and periods. Even if a woman feels she has a lump, she would be too embarrassed to talk about it, and it might be too late by the time she does. Women are not even encouraged to dry their under wear out in the open. Even if there is some discomfort (say UTI) women avoid going to a gynaecologist – I see the talk of bra colour as one small step towards discarding this taboo. After all it’s just an article of clothing that covers just a part of the body, that needs regular check ups.
amrutha
Thanks for all your comments. I agree that it is not common or acceptable for a woman to talk about such personal things in public and that this campaign has actually helped us rid ourselves of this reluctance. But, in my opinion, putting up the colour as FB status message is just plain voyeuristic. As far as I know, men usually think, not of breast cancer, but of the organ in question when they see a colour as the status message. I would rather not provide fodder for their imagination, as I have said before. The point here is this. By generating such a buzz around the colour of our undergarments, we have actually taken the focus away from the issue of the day: breast cancer. Maybe some people, as Nu says, would be encouraged to go read up on cancer, but a large majority is just doing it for the sake of doing it. That kind of defeats the purpose.
Krishna Aradhi
IMO, this does sound a bit voyeuristic. I got calls from quite a few of my male friends yesterday saying that the ladies on FB were putting up their bra color as a status message (I myself hardly visit any social networking sites, so I had no inkling of this stupid meme). I asked them why these ladies were doing so and none of them had any idea why. All they were interested in was the color of the bra. So, where is the awareness?
And I wonder how many ladies themselves had any idea why they were being told to put up their bra color as as status message.
Sreekrishnan
wonder what they would want us to put up for aids campaign !
Too terrible to contemplate!! 😀
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karthikeyan pandian
Was laughing at the stupidity of people in face book after reading this 🙂 I hope this topic is a health issue .. Men do have their own health issues similar to this and in this case it is for women .All these things are personal to a person . Creating an awareness is good(I would say best), but as you mentioned, this a crazy useless time wasting crap activity !!!!! There are n number of other ways to create awareness.Not only this disease , any other disease that is a threat to humanity.