It can't be just me

It started with the petitions. And the facebook groups. Save The Whales. Stop Uranium Mining. Save The South African Police Child Abuse Unit. The last one got me curious, so I checked snopes, and confirmed my suspicion that so many of these feel-good-but-make-no-damn-difference campaigns are worse than useless, and frequently completely redundant, even if the cause is in fact more than an urban myth.

This bra colour campaign got me thinking - although not what the creators or participants of this campaign had in mind. I've been doing a slow burn since yesterday morning when this campaign started, and when I read AllFacebook's claim this morning about a men's underwear campaign, due to the 'incredible success' of yesterdays bra campaign, something snapped, pardon the pun.

This note is not a criticism of any of my facebook friends who participated yesterday. Seriously, I don't want anyone to think that this is a personal attack, it's not. It's that I'm fuming at what looks tome like a damaging campaign. It's a criticism of the people who create the false impression that this kind of simplistic activity, in and of itself, will actually do any good. In my view, breast cancer is decades past needing awareness - I doubt there are many people left who can see a pink ribbon bumper sticker without knowing what it's for. My argument is that, unlike other more rare conditions, no-one is unaware of breast cancer. Let's take awareness as a given, and then take the subsequent steps that move the world closer to prevention and cure.

As an aside, breast cancer kills one tenth as many as heart disease. A tenth. How many of you would have guessed that? Why do you think that is that you didn't realise that? Maybe because tits are more appealing than internal organs, in the way that everyone abhors dolphins and whales being killed for food, but couldn't care less about calves. It tells me that breast cancer 'awareness' campaigns are not only superfluous, but they are diverting energy and awareness from something that is 10 times more likely to kill you. That figure again - ten times. Which disease do you think should have 10 times the recognition of the other? What colour is the ribbon for heart disease? There isn't one - but more than one of you stopped and thought about it, wondered what it was...and there isn't one, what does that tell you?....or a snappy slogan, like the one for the last breast cancer awareness campaign a few months ago, "Save Second Base" (now *that* is a great campaign to raise MONEY - not awareness - for research and prevention programs...I would pay twenty bucks for a t-shirt with that slogan and an appropriate picture...yep, it's crass, but if you have the income to donate twenty bucks to every single worthy charity, you must be Donald Trump...if you want me to spend my limited cash on your passion rather than mine, you have to really stand out from the crowd)...where's the snappy slogan for heart disease? Even the Heartsmart logo on packaged food looks like it's been made redundant because the Heart Foundation accepts cash for endorsement and has lowered the bar below useful as a result...

I have had several friends die of cancer, and more that have survived after having major surgery. Three have had mastectomies. A close friend is, as I write, in hospital recovering from an operation to remove a large tumour from their bowel. I have a dog in this fight. I want to see a cure. I think that campaigns like this take us further away from a cure, by making ineffective lip-service too easy, without the mandatory follow-on link from 2-second status update to parting with cold hard cash, or booking the overdue mammogram...I can recall at least four breast cancer awareness campaigns in the last 12 months...there is a 'turn facebook pink' campaign underway as I write...

The attached article is AllFacebook's self-congratulatory message; the following two are my responses. It has occurred to me that having now spent an entire week dealing with a painful shoulder injury, primarily by taking as much hydrocodone as the doc will give me, that there's an outside chance that I am currently less than my usual light-hearted and effervescent self, and there may be a possibility that I have got it wr...wr-r-r-r....wr-r-r-r-o...less correct than I usually am...I'm interested in what my 76 closest and most trusted friends think...for the record, I draw the line at being lynched...

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Facebook Boxers Campaign Attempts To Duplicate Success Of Bra Color Campaign
Posted by Nick O'Neill on January 11th, 2010 10:35 AM
Share78 3 Comments »
After the incredible success of the Facebook bra color campaign, guys are now being encouraged to post the types of underwear they are using in order to spread awareness about prostate cancer. It’s not exactly a new concept. Within minutes of women posting their bra colors, many guys began posting the colors of their underwear in order to “raise awareness about testicular cancer”. It’s clear though that this was just an attempt to have some fun with the existing breast cancer campaign.

The following message was being sent out to male users over the past 24 hours:
“Some fun is going on,which is also raising awareness of Prostate Cancer Just write “briefs” , “boxers,” “jocks,” or “commando” in your status. Just the word, nothing else. It will be cool to see if this will spread Prostate cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the men describe their shorts in their status.”
We’re copying a worldwide effort started by Breast Cancer activists, who are updating their facebook status with their bra color. In the spirit of emulation being a sincere form of flattery, why not?
So will the campaign for men to post their underwear gain as much traction? Personally I think breasts always generate more buzz, however I’ve had numerous male friends post their underwear color and pattern to their status. It’s a catchy idea and it’s extremely simple. I’ve seen numerous conversations spawned as a result of a user posting only a color and a wink. Last week’s bra color campaign is ongoing and now there is a movement for men to do the same.
Following every successful vial Facebook campaign there are always loads of copycats, although most, if not all, fail to gain a similar traction as the initial campaign. For now we’ll have to wait and see if the prostate cancer (or testicular cancer) campaigns generate similar traction. Whether or not they do, having a little bit of fun to generate cancer awareness is never a bad thing!

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Jack Butler:
An incredible success? By what measure? Thousands of women writing one word then going back to sleep on the issue? An awareness campaign that holds back what it is that we're supposed to be aware of? Where the posters get pissy because 'men' let the secret out of the bag? Did you, 'AllFacebook', read the comments on your own post? Where there is no process by which to donate, or make any kind of contribution? Yes, we are aware that breast cancer exists, that news has been out for a while now. To be effective, campaigns need to offer more than for people to post cute, cryptic one-word status updates and do nothing else.

Show me the money - how did the fight against breast cancer benefit from this banal idea?

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Jack Butler:
Mark, you miss the point; awareness is a first step, and conditions like mesothelioma and benign intercranial hypertension (an FB friend posted a link today, she has a friend who has it) need more of it. People are already well aware of breast cancer. I had a 36 yo friend die of it. She didn't die because there weren't enough people who'd heard of it. She died, as so many others do, because she had an incompetent oncologist, and because research is so dependent on big pharmacy that they withhold information from each other to secure the funds they need. Because people think writing 'RED' in their FB status bar is all they need to do. As Randy points out, "this should save a lot of lives... not really sure how.. but we can feel like we are doing something"...and, having done little more than encourage all their male FB friends to stare at their boobs while they wonder whether you're still wearing the Lilac one, they feel so good about having 'helped', that they do nothing more. No donation, no buying a t-shirt, no offering to volunteer at a cancer ward, reading books to people too whacked on morphine to read for themselves. Sorry, that's just too hard, isn't it? Try the 'turn FB pink' campaign. That looks like a real campaign. It might make a difference. The bra and boxer ideas do more harm than good, by salving people's conscience without them actually having to do anything.

Read these: http://tinyurl.com/yeusctk

and

http://tinyurl.com/y8o7fey

then get back to me.

I'd like to see a cure for breast cancer. I'd like to see a cure for all cancers. Campaigns like this distract energy from things that might achieve that. Without a link or even yet another breast examination chart (is there *anyone* that doesn't know how to do this, after twenty or thirty years of 'awareness' campaigns?) This campaign is great, I have dozens of very pleasant mental images I wouldn't otherwise have had. Given I was already aware that breast cancer existed and regular self examination *may* help (last I heard they're now rethinking the usefulness of mammograms), the campaign achieved very little else....

This was a facebook traffic generator, nothing else.

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