You might have noticed a bunch of your friends on Facebook posting a single red heart emoji to other people’s pages. You might not have. Depends on the level of gronk amongst your Facebook friends, I suppose.
Well, it’s part of a fairly problematic awareness campaign for breast cancer. Post a heart on your friend’s wall, then send them a private message reminding them to get their breasts checked. But if any guys comment asking what the hearts are all about, reports Health, then you’re supposed to stay silent, “since the game is meant only for women.”
Right. So it’s an awareness campaign… that’s purposefully obtuse. Okay.
Health – one of the very few websites to write about this trend – reports that the red heart thing has resurfaced a number of times over the last couple years, usually during Breast Cancer Awareness month (October).
It rings distant bells of some time, maybe circa 2009, when women would post ‘Pink!’ or ‘Black ;)’ on Facebook depending on what colour bra they were wearing, then message all their female friends to do the same and shhhhhhh, not explain to any of the guys. Probably also for breast cancer awareness, come to think of it.
But how we use Facebook has changed a lot since then, as well as Facebook’s ever-evolving algorithms. If the raising awareness is really your jam, then you’d be better off posting a red heart to your wall and tagging your closest female friends with an explanation and a few helpful links, thereby exponentially increasing the number of people exposed to this life-saving message.
And that whole “for women only” thing is outdated anyway. It completely erases trans people from the conversation, when in fact trans men and women are at a higher risk for developing breast cancer thanks to receiving high doses of estrogen or testosterone (excess testosterone can be converted to estrogen).
And lastly, it obviously affects men too. A minuscule percentage, sure (of the over 16,000 people diagnosed with breast cancer in Australia last year, 150 were blokes), but this group are already facing stigma due to gendered constructs about what a breast actually is (spoiler: everyone has breast tissue).
In the end, the people most likely to be posting hearts on walls are also the kind of people who share ‘I love cooking with wine, sometimes I even put it in the food!’ memes and are therefore statistically more likely to be blocked by everyone known to them.
Just check your goddamn breasts.
Photo: Emily Ratajkowski / Instagram.
