Last week at some point I noticed that my female FB friends were posting colors as their status updates.

Blue. Black. Pink.

I saw only single colors. None of the “orange with lacey trim” updates. If I’d seen the latter, I would have realized what they were talking about despite the fact that I have donned undergarments only a handful of times in the last two years.

Puzzled and on the verge of finding it really annoying, I posted a query in my own status update bar and received several private messages informing me that it was a trick that we women were playing on the men.

Psst … post your bra color and they won’t know what we are on about … tee hee hee. Pass it on.

Only one of the messages I received informed me of the “raising awareness for breast cancer” aspect of the meme. Just one. So much for raising awareness because I think quite a few women playing along had no idea why they were supposed to be doing this. They thought it was a neat in-joke on the men who followed their feeds because as anyone who ever played the game “telephone” knows, passed along messages drop parts of or garble context as they travel.

Once I knew the purpose, I spent a whole 5 seconds contemplating it before going back to updating about me. I had no bra color to update, that’s true, but I am not kindly disposed towards awareness campaigns that are never ending, as breast cancer is, and I still have issues with the whole “raising awareness” for certain diseases and not others.

For example, my late husband died because of a genetic metabolic disorder. There are about a half dozen metabolic disorders and nearly all of them are life-limiting in gruesome, family destroying ways. They are rare. Which is their bad. And no famous people have been afflicted by them that I am aware of, which means no one can start a campaign that will touch the hearts of the masses. No fun little “remember the genetically afflicted” FB meme’s for the victims of metabolic syndromes, alas.

I have noticed, perhaps you have to, that diseases afflicting the famous in some way are the ones that most people hear the most about. Or diseases that are noticeable and inflict hardship. On men. Losing breasts is hard to cover up, so to speak and it strikes at the “heart” of how women are judged on the attractiveness/desirability scale – by men. If women were being afflicted with a cancer no one could see, or that wasn’t connected to men’s sexual needs in some way that doesn’t make them squeamish, we wouldn’t hear a thing about it. It wouldn’t matter. Breasts matter to men. So breast cancer is a big deal. Cervical cancer and ovarian cancer are inside and icky, and men don’t want to know about anything below the navel save that there is a hole they can stick themselves in, ergo no walks, ribbons or year round assaulting awareness campaigns for cancers of the naughty bits or plumbing.

Rob’s late wife had melanoma. Do you know what color the ribbon is? Black. Nothing frou-frou or girly or uplifting about that color or even the tiniest bit hopeful for melanoma victims. Do you hear much about melanoma except for the yearly half-assed media censure against tanning salons that usually come out around the time that little high school girls are getting ready for spring prom?

No. You don’t.

Heart disease actually kills the most women every year while we are being encouraged to believe that very moderate exercise is okay and that fat should be a beauty standard.

Lung cancer is slowly moving up on the killer of women scale. Did you know that either?  Probably not. Lungs, unfortunately for them, are hidden underneath the most important of female assets and therefore, don’t count.

Someone on my FB friend’s list was upset by the “backlash” against the campaign. She thought we were heartless people not fit to be good friends and play along because you never know who might someday be stricken. That’s her opinion. I can see why she might feel that way. I offered my experience with the meme and was basically told to “fuck off” by some of her friends, and so I did. In the yoga sutras, Patanjali advises use of the fourth key in some instances and this was one of them. But pretending that something was a good idea or properly executed when it clearly wasn’t is not the way to go about promoting anything but discord and does more to turn people away from awareness efforts than not.

I didn’t post my lack of bra status. It was dumb regardless of the true reason though probably not as dumb as Farmville.

Coy outreach programs = advertising fails, but that’s just my opinion, as always.