Every few months, some new fad pops up on social media purporting to “raise awareness” for something. The something is usually breast cancer, and the fads are usually spread around by women. The problem is, they do absolutely nothing at all to help the causes the people sharing them are claiming to support.
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There was the idea of posting what color your bra was, but not telling anyone what it means. So you would post, say, “red”, and then laugh as all the men got confused about what all these women were posting colors for. Disagree or refuse to play, and you’d get chastised. Because somehow, posting your bra color was going to help raise awareness for breast cancer.
Then there was the game that asked women where they put their purse. But like the bra game, no one was supposed to explain. Instead, you were just supposed to write out an obvious sexual innuendo — “I like it on the floor!” — and snicker once again. And this also was somehow going to show solidarity with women battling breast cancer. It goes on and on with stupid games and memes, all claiming to raise awareness for some cause or another. Kony 2012, the bra game, the purse game, the underwear game, posting hearts… it goes on and on.
Now, it’s the no-makeup selfie. It’s pretty self explanatory. Women are told to post a selfie with no makeup on, to raise awareness for cancer. The reason behind it is so that you can feel as vulnerable and exposed as people fighting cancer do. Get it? Washing off your makeup and posting it on Facebook is totally the same as fighting breast cancer! It’s even more idiotic and offensive as all the games that came before it.
Kim Stephens, an Australian journalist and cancer survivor, wrote a column slamming the no makeup selfie fad, rightfully calling it self-indulgent. Because let’s be real: people posting selfies of themselves with no makeup aren’t actually doing anything to help fight cancer or support people fighting it. It’s narcissism, plain and simple. It’s a way for girls to dig for compliments while pretending to do something good.
“Raising awareness” is the lazy person’s way of feeling like they’ve been charitable, like they’ve contributed some good to the world.
But who, exactly, isn’t aware of cancer? Everyone knows cancer exists. We don’t need more “awareness”. Doing something to raise awareness of diseases that everyone already knows about is doing nothing at all. And for most of these people, the only thing they’ll do to help people fighting cancer is post the color of their bra or a selfie with no makeup on. It’s despicable, quite frankly, and delusional as well.
Let’s say that, for some reason, we do still need to raise awareness for cancer, the disease that everyone already knows exists. What point is it to raise awareness if no one will actually get off of social media and do something?
Posting a status update for “awareness” does nothing. It means nothing. And most of the time, it’s insulting and hurtful to people actually fighting the battles that the game is claiming to help. Awareness is meaningless without action, but hey — it sure is a whole lot easier to take a narcissistic photo of yourself to serve as compliment bait than it is to donate money to a cancer charity, or volunteer at the cancer wing at your local hospital, or go donate hair for Locks of Love. Actually doing something is what helps, not posting something lame on Facebook. That serves no purpose other than letting you give yourself a pat on the back. It’s self-serving and lazy. It isn’t about people fighting cancer. It’s about the person posting the photo or bra color. And it needs to stop.
Let’s get rid of this idea of raising awareness, and start focusing on action. If we want to help the people we claim to care so much about, then let’s try getting off of Facebook and into the real world. Or is that too much work for us?