A rant I posted to Facebook about gender-based guessing games from late January-ish:

[azurelunatic]

Several friends have sent me this:

Subject: Breast Cancer Awareness

We are playing a game. Someone proposed that we GIRLS do something special in Facebook to help gain awareness for Breast Cancer. It's so easy that I'd like you to join us to help it spread! Last year it was about writing the color of the bra you were wearing in your FB status... and it left men wondering for days why the girls had (apparently random) colors as their status. This year it has to do with our love relationships...in other words, where you are in your relationships at the present time. You will indicate where you are currently by posting a 'code' word from the list below in your status. For example, if you are single, you would post the word "tequila."


tequila: I'm a single woman

rum: I'm a touch and go woman

champagne: I'm an engaged woman

Red Bull: I'm a woman in a relationship

beer: I'm a married woman

vodka: I'm the "other one"

Sprite: I'm a woman who can't find the right man

whiskey: I'm a single woman but my friends won't stop partying

liquor: I'm a woman who wishes she was single

gin: I'm a woman who wants to get married


All you need to do now is post the word from the above list that best represents your situation as your FB status (DON'T REPLY TO THIS EMAIL, JUST POST THE WORD IN YOUR STATUS.) Then, copy and paste this message and send it to all of your girlfriends as a MESSAGE. The Bra game reached the news. Let's try to get this one on the news, too! Help us show everyone how powerful women really are.

This is asinine. I am generally in favor of Women's Mystery spiritual stuff, because it is powerful for people who do identify primarily as women, but this is not "mystery", this is a stupid guessing game with "breast cancer awareness" clumsily tacked on to help it spread. Every time someone assumes that simply because I'm a geek in a female body, of course I'd like to HELP SPREAD A STUPID GUESSING GAME WHERE THE PRIMARY OBJECT IS CONFUSING MEN, I get a little more annoyed. I think this is the fifth time I've been sent this one? Sixth? I'm not sure. It was enough to push me over my threshold from "annoyed" to "actually mad enough to rant".


What would I like people to take away from this rant?


Since apparently I count as a woman, I would like the men reading this to know that not all women are into cute little guessing games.

If you maintain a list of people who play games like this, please take me off it.

I am generally against things where the point of the game is to have insiders and outsiders. I'm not against secret societies or you-really-had-to-be-there things, but there are enough naturally occurring exclusive groups already, and my god, really, saying something obscure about your relationship status, how exactly is this going to do anything about breast cancer? Which men can get too, by the way.

Know your body. Know what's normal for it. Don't shy away from it in the mirror; don't shy away from touching it. If you notice something weird, check with your doctor.


http://www.breastcancer.org/symptoms/understand_bc/symptoms.jsp

According to the American Cancer Society, any of the following unusual changes in the breast can be a symptom of breast cancer:

* swelling of all or part of the breast
* skin irritation or dimpling
* breast pain
* nipple pain or the nipple turning inward
* redness, scaliness, or thickening of the nipple or breast skin
* a nipple discharge other than breast milk
* a lump in the underarm area

These changes also can be signs of less serious conditions that are not cancerous, such as an infection or a cyst. It’s important to get any breast changes checked out promptly by a doctor.

Comments

[thedivinegoat]

Halle-fucking-ujah.

I hate these things. Every time someone sends me one I post a rant to my FB, yet I still seem to get sent them. People just don't think.

[azurelunatic]

I seem not to have received any more since then. Of course, I don't know if there were any going around between then and now...

[liv]

Good rant. I hate those things, they're among the worst of the chain statuses on FB, people will post pretty much anything if you just slap "awareness" on it. And sexist humour really has nothing to do with breast cancer anyway.

[ysobel]

How the fucking hell does random alcohol association with no meaning behind it have ANYTHING AT ALL to do with breast cancer awareness?

[krait]

THIS.

Also, is it really going to elicit awareness? Because -- in my admittedly near-zero familiarity with FB -- if I see that MarySue Enoby has set her "status" to "Vodka", I'm just going to assume that she's drinking. If her friends SaraSue and TaraSue have theirs set to "Gin" and "Sprite" on the same day, I'm probably going to assume that they've gone out to lunch or are hosting a party.

In sum: It's not even a MYSTERY, which gives you a chance to explain the (however stupid and illogical) connexion to 'awareness', because I suspect most people won't realise any code is involved!

[azurelunatic]

In practice, if there's a large enough critical mass of otherwise-unrelated folks doing the same cryptic and slightly stupid-looking thing, people are going to ask. People also ask about individual cryptic-and-slightly-stupid things, and it's a little more transparent than the reading page, on account of the two (sometimes three) most recent comments being visible along with the status update. (And I stopped right in the middle of writing this comment to go make a suggestion, and then go retrieve pizza. See my attention span at work.) But the stupid design of the "secret" part of it doesn't actually allow for public discussion of the supposed purpose, so it's just completely bogus.

[jamoche]

Didn't the bra-color meme spread faster than the explanation, so that a lot of people were doing it with no clue as to the origin?

[cleverthylacine]

Yes. I almost was one of them before it occurred to me that there was no possible way this fuckery could be anything intelligent, simply because of the people who were doing it that I did not think were dumbasses.

[krait]

Ah, you have a good point. Along with not really knowing how it works (what is a "status"? Where does it appear? Do status changes generally inspire commentary? Do people usually announce why it's changed? Does it show up on the equivalent of a friendslist, or only on one's profile? et cetera), I think I tend to forget the massiveness/lack-of-relationship-ness of Facebook, since I'm not on it; my frame of reference is more, well, my non-fannish LJ, which has about ten friends and most of them are people I know in RL. So if five of them start posting random alcohol updates, I'd just figure I missed a party invitation. But, yeah, if I saw that fifty people had done it, I'd probably figure that something was up!

[azurelunatic]

Facebook has two forms of 'entry', the 'status', which is short-form and shows up on the 'news feed' (equivalent to friends list) and profile, and the 'note', which also shows up there but can be longer, and only shows part of it.

All of my various social networks have people who know each other and people who don't; for me there's an "Okay, what the hell is going on here" when people who are not to my knowledge connected directly to each other besides through me start doing the same thing at approximately the same time, and it doesn't look like it's through any of the usual places where memes feed in (there will be several people who don't know each other linking to the same Cracked article, and/or XKCD comic, for example).

[azurelunatic]

It's that whole toxic "men and women might as well be separate species and can never understand each other" meme, applied very badly. When a thing hits a certain saturation point, a certain percentage of people not in the know are going to ask what the fuck is going on, and then ... presumably the people playing will tell the women who are not playing what is going on, and will leave the men confused, and goodness knows what they would or wouldn't tell the nonbinary folks. But <sarcasm> it wouldn't matter if they didn't tell the men, because no woman has ever discovered breast cancer as the result of a male partner squeezing her tits and saying "Hon, something's weird here..."</sarcasm>

[niqaeli]

...what the fuck.

I can't even begin to dissect the amount of bullshit in this because, wow. Fuck that noise.

[azurelunatic]

Let's start with the thing where women who barely know each other have more in common than men and women who are BFFs.

[krait]

I'm suddenly even more grateful than usual that I've managed to dodge the Facebook thing. *sigh*

Seriously, it's every bad thing about AOL when I was thirteen (random people I don't care about sending me IMs about themselves because we shared a kindergarten teacher; total strangers convinced that I really want to read about their TMI), combined with every stupid "Forward this or you'll never get a boyfriend/your boyfriend will leave you!!1!" chain-email I've ever received. *throws up hands*

(Also: how is there a single code-booze for "relationship", yet nine out of ten of the boozes mentioned stand in for some sort of relationship status? Logicfail: it makes even awarenessfail worse.)

[leora.livejournal.com]

I don't know what a "touch and go" woman is. It strikes me as in extremely poor taste to state that you're in a relationship but wish you were single on Facebook. The code will be learned, and if you want to break up with the person you are with, tell them that. Making it a Facebook status seems really rude. Maybe that's okay if you're already in the process of a divorce that your partner is aware of and it's just not finalized yet.

[azurelunatic]

I am guessing that "touch and go" involves a stream of brief relationships.

And yes, it's in very poor taste.

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

+1

On top of that, they left out "widowed" as a marital status. Now, I'm guessing that the age group of most of these GIRLS is low enough that few of them are actual widows, but death of a spouse can happen at any age, and this just smacks of disrespect to those who've had that happen and yet aren't comfortable saying that they're married or single, and are certainly not looking for another relationship (at least, not at present). =P

Also, marital status has nothing to do with breast cancer awareness, and excluding "widowed" from one of the options makes it even that much more ironic and offensive, IMHO.

[pauamma]

Other hidden assumption: "it's OK to stick to alcoholic drinks"

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

Red Bull is an energy drink (though the can makes it look like beer, LOL), and Sprite is a soft drink, neither of which have alcoholic content. But you make a good point about that, too, since most of the other drinks are alcoholic.

The game is just ridiculous and misguided overall, even if well-meaning.

[pauamma]

Ah, I missed those in the list

[amiga500.livejournal.com]

'Breast cancer awareness' seems to be more about bad sympathetic magic than anything. How stupid do you have to be to think that having a pink bumper sticker or toaster is going to do anything beyond decorate your trunk, or burn your bread? At best, a charity may have received a few cents for what you shelled out, but there's nothing stopping you from making your own donation, merchandise or not. At least this game isn't making money for any corporations.

Sorry, rant from a rant there. I'm sick of this sort of thing. I could talk about boobs all day (thank you, still-nursing toddler and mom-friends), but this sort of thing is annoying on so many levels.

[azurelunatic]

Maybe I should find something pink to hang in my shower so I'll remember to check my boobs more often. Though I think I'd notice something amiss just in general.