CarnalNation

Thousands of female users - and some male ones – seem to think the bra or boxer colours help raise awareness for breast cancer as they began updating their Facebook statuses with “beige”, “hot pink”, “crimson red”, “sexy black and gold” or even “nothing”.

As online confusion raged and dozens of bloggers speculated about its meaning, it was disclosed it was part of a new campaign to help raise awareness for breast cancer. The message sent out was: "Write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY women, 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 wonder why the women have a color in their status.....LOL!"

Detroit Free Press suggests that the color update campaign has been started by women in Detroit, who are trying to raise awareness around Breast Cancer. Facebook is not sure where or how the craze started but told CNN that it was an example of a “grass-roots” movement beginning on the social networking site.

So this social experiment shows you can spread an idea fast and wide, but majority of the online communities agree that the bra color ripple will have little impact on more important issues including adequate health care, lack of attention paid to other diseases that kill women and the millions in spending in breast cancer marketing and advertising.

Ratso Rizzo is doing absolutely nothing on Facebook, "Here's why. For two days I saw these moronic posts in which women were just posting a color and nothing else. I wasn't interested in why they were posting it so I'm assuming a lot of other people weren't either. Therefore, it didn't raise awareness. If you want to raise awareness actually post something about breast cancer."

Carlin Ross, sex-positive activist has stronger words, “WTF is wrong with women? ... If they had asked every woman to write a sentence about how breast cancer has affected their lives and post it on their Facebook wall it would have been amazing.  Everyone has been touched by breast cancer.  Collect those stories - have women share and commune with each other and start a fucking networking group or raise some money for research.  Anything but post your bra color to give every guy in your friends list a hard on.”

Sueann Mark, breast cancer survivor and clinical sexologist wrote on her Facebook: “Who cares what color my bra is? I'm a living, breathing example of the importance of breast self exam and the fight against breast cancer.”

In a poignant blog entry, whymummy shared: “This was ostensibly an effort to raise awareness of breast cancer -- but one in which breast cancer survivors themselves could not participate, and were reminded (as if we needed a reminder) that we didn't need bras anymore, that most basic undergarment of women everywhere, that symbol of sexuality, for the simple reason that we had already sacrificed our breasts in a hail mary attempt to keep the rest of our bodies from dying of cancer.”

Don’t jump on the bandwagon on putting your bra or boxer shirt color on your Facebook status - or anything else for that matter - without asking yourself if this is the thing you want to be doing. As of 12:39 a.m. (Singapore time), the Facebook ‘Not Posting the Color of Your Bra’, with 428 fans, urges readers to make donations of time or money to cancer societies or at least to refresh their statuses with medical facts.