Facebook and Breast Cancer Awareness

Last week my friend Selena Seymour lost her long and arduous battle with breast cancer. She was a single mom who left behind a precious 5 year old boy. After standing with her in prayer and believing for healing, my heart was broken when she finally passed away. I cried and prayed fervently for that beautiful little boy, grieving as I thought about the fact that he now must grow up without her.

I remember being moved as she shared in a note on her FB page a couple years ago about what it was like going through treatment while being a single mom:

"My son does not know of the days I would walk straight into walls and doors out of pure exhaustion of raising a colicky newborn while debilitated by cancer treatments. He will never know how much pain I endured from him grabbing onto my port under the skin of my chest or how painful it was to try and hold him with the severe radiation burns that ran from my neck, shoulder and down my breast and back. He’ll never know how I held my breath as tears rolled down my face from the agony of trying to change diapers after my surgeries. He’ll never know how I held his sleeping body in my arms and sobbed silently in the night as visions of my death and his life without me infected my brain.

Everyday I hold it together because I want my son to one day understand that cancer or not I have a beautiful life to live."

I cried and cried as I read her post that day...now my heart breaks for Joaquin and for her family. It was a LONG battle and she was a very brave woman!

So when I first got the message in my inbox that I should post where I prefer to leave my purse as my Facebook status in order to promote Breast Cancer Awareness...I immediately deleted it. I honestly didn't really read beyond the part that said to post it like this: "I like it on the counter." I remember last year when everyone started posting their bra color and instantaneously had a flood of emotions.

• Emotions about the ridiculous claim that posting such a thing is somehow going to promote Breast Cancer Awareness.
  
• Emotions about the inappropriateness of such a statement when all it does is cause others in your friends list to imagine you "on the counter"...
  
• Emotions about how difficult it is for men and boys who have, as Job said in Job 31:1,“I made a covenant with my eyes not to look with lust at a young woman" to succeed when they are inundated with inappropriate images, words, expressions, emails, TV commercials, inappropriately dressed girls and women, etc.

Anyway, I guess you could say I got a little angry...and before it got out of control I decided to walk away from my computer and focus on something else (of course that was after I posted a nasty little comment on a friends post...sorry Katie...and after I called the branch manager at my local bank to complain about the ENORMOUS amount of cleavage the teller had the other day…geez!)

Today I read a blog post by my friend Tishra Beeson. She was much more articulate than I could or would be in my state of annoyance and disgust… So, I’m posting a copy of her blog post here. I hope it makes you think about it before you post where you "like it":

http://beesonbeat.blogspot.com/

Breast Cancer Awareness and Facebook Status Misuse

I love Facebook. If you took a survey of my top visited websites during the day, Facebook might be number two or three. I love the idea of Facebook as a social mass marketing tool, and especially as a mechanism for health promotion. Unfortunately it has been grossly under-researched and under-utilized as a health messaging utility. One thing I do know is that the recent facebook campaigns for breast cancer awareness have left many of us a confused and a little irritated this year.


MSNBC describes the phenomenon:


“ ‘I like it on the floor.’ ‘I like it on the kitchen counter.’ ‘I like it on the coffee table.’… Ladies are updating their statuses to let all their friends know where they like to put their handbags (obviously) when they get home, which (obviously) is intended to promote breast cancer awareness … It's kind of like when last year's ‘what color is your bra’ status updates went viral, in which Facebook's females posted just ‘black’ or ‘pink,’ intending to raise breast cancer awareness. This year, an e-mail is circulating around Facebook inboxes asking women to update their status with " where we put our handbag the moment we get home(i). "


While I still can’t understand the connection between handbags and breast cancer, here are a few more reasons why this Facebook message is senseless and simply inappropriate.


1. The message is irrational. Filling your facebook status with the color of your bra or “where you like it” is more provocative than it is promotional, leaving imaginative followers picturing things far beyond disease prevention. By pimping users’ statuses, the attention is inevitably diverted to something that is sexually charged and away from the fight of millions of women who are facing this disease.


2. The message is incomplete. It is intentionally laced with mystery, telling women not to post any comments or explanations in their posts. By doing so, it fails to establish any link between what we are reading and further critical information about breast cancer, treatment, or screening, the crux of the breast cancer awareness movement. According to Healthy People 2010(ii), effective health communication should be accurate, balanced, evidence-based, and reliable. These new suggestive Facebook statuses clearly leave these important concepts out, creating information delays for women who really should be hearing messages about breast cancer awareness.


3. The message is irreverent. Like many of you, I know many strong, beautiful women who have fought with courage against breast cancer. Making a game out of it on Facebook or Twitter without any rhyme, reason, or relevance is an injustice to those women and their families.


4. The message is ineffective. Giving the creators of this fad the benefit of the doubt, I imagine they intended for these racy messages to give breast cancer awareness a “sexy” edge, making it more appealing to Facebook users, and encouraging them to seek out testing/prevention strategies (I am being generous with this assumption). But I really wonder how many women that posted their bra color or their purse location actually conducted a breast self-exam, or talked to their doctor about their risks, or changed their diet, or engaged in any of the early detection strategies promoted during breast cancer awareness month.


5. The message is elitist. According to message that hit Facebook inboxes earlier this week, “it leaves men wondering for days … let’s see how powerful we women really are.” While I have nothing against female empowerment, this sends a totally inappropriate message leaving out a key population: men. The National Cancer Institute cites that nearly 2,000 men will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, with nearly 400 deaths associated with male breast cancer. Not to mention the countless husbands, brothers, sons, and male friends of women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer who are completely excluded from this seemingly supportive, yet totally disrespectful Facebook trend.


Health messaging that goes viral is the pipedream of public health researchers (including yours truly), but women who are posting sexual innuendo and hints at the color of the underwear simply aren’t getting the point across that over 200,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and that “more American women have died of breast cancer in the last 20 years than the number of Americans killed in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined(iii).” Nor is this new internet stunt connecting women with appropriate and accurate health information on screening and early detection, which we know is the most highly effective strategy to improve survival rates(iv).


I am a firm believer that Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a cause worthy of substantial action, so here are some other things you can really feel good about, regardless of what color your bra is or where you put your purse at the end of the day.

• Take part in the 2010 Komen Race for the Cure 5K series throughout the month of October in a city near you: The event began in Dallas in 1983 and has now grown to almost 120 races around the world.


• Take part in the 12th annual Yoplait "Save Lids to Save Lives" drive, where the yogurt company will donate 10 cents for every pink lid you send by Dec. 31. And this year, they've increased their donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure to at least $500,000 and up to $1.6 million.


• Upload a photo to the global photo mosaic on 69-seconds.org, and "watch the world go pink."


• Cyclists can sign up for the Ride to Empower from Oct. 21-24 for routes that are up to 100 miles in Springdale, Utah for Breast Cancer Network of Strength's Ride to Empower.


• Many offices throughout the U.S. have pink days where workplaces arrange for everyone to wear pink clothing or accessories to work in October, and raise money by organizing activities at the local level.


• For the second year in a row, the NFL has "A Crucial Catch: Annual Screening Saves Lives" program that helps encourage women over 40 to have an annual mammogram .


• NFL partners, including Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Gatorade and Wilson have produced pink products for Breast Cancer Awareness games so you can purchase lots of pink NFL and non-NFL related merchandise throughout October.


• Talk to your family and friends about early detection and screening. And do a breast self-exam, yourself!


• Donate to organizations like Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the American Cancer Society, or the National Breast Cancer Foundation (v).

*Disclaimer – This is not intended to single-out or berate any individual or group. It is merely meant to raise discussion on the importance of breast cancer awareness and the concerns of a less-than-effective health messaging trend currently on the rise.

i. Dahl, M. (2010). How effective are sexy breast cancer awareness stunts, anyways?http://msnbc.com/
ii. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Healthy People 2010. Health Communication.
iii. Breast Cancer Action. (2008). Statistics and General Facts.http://bcaction.org/index.php?page=statistics-and-general-facts
iv. American Cancer Society. (2010) Breast Cancer: Early Detection.http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/BreastCancer/MoreInformation/BreastCancerEarlyDetection/breast-cancer-early-detection-importance-of-finding-early
v. Adapted from FoxNY October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. October 4, 2010.http://myfoxny.com/