Bra colors?
On Facebook yesterday, a bunch of my friends posted status messages containing only a color name. Or, in some cases, a brief description of a pattern.
After a dozen or so such messages, I saw someone explain that the idea was to post your underwear color.
It didn't occur to me to look at the gender of the people posting the colors. I don't know whether most of them were women or not.
Just now, I came across an article that explains that it was meant to be bra color, and that the goal was "to raise awareness for breast cancer research."
So now I'm curious. For those of you (both female and male) who didn't receive the supposed-to-be-for-women-only email explaining what was going on:
Did y'all know this was specifically meant to be bras, not other kinds of underwear?
Did y'all know it was specifically meant to be women (and not men) posting colors?
Did y'all know this had anything to do with breast cancer research?
I'm especially curious whether what was going on was more obvious (in the absence of the email explanation) to women than to men.
. . . I suppose a meme without an explanation can raise curiosity that leads to awareness, much like viral marketing campaigns. But the connection here feels pretty tenuous to me.
On the other hand, it appears that large numbers of people are searching for info about this (article says: 'At noon today, "color status on Facebook" was number 11 on Google Trends and was making fast gains on Twitter'), and there are articles about the meme all over the mainstream media, so maybe it's having exactly the intended effect.
(Added later: It occurs to me that this post may come across as a complaint, in various ways. If so, I'm sorry; it wasn't meant that way. It was intended more as an "Oh, huh, that's an interesting sociological phenomenon, and I'm curious to find out more about how (and how well) it worked." I didn't intend to criticize anyone who participated in it, or to denigrate or derail the important cause of raising awareness of breast cancer research.)