What's On Your Mind?
BY CANSU ORANÇ (PSYC/IV)
oranc@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
If you're one of the 500 million users of Facebook, you must be highly familiar with this question. If you're one of the 285 million female users of Facebook, it's highly possible that last week you answered this question as follows: "I like it on the …"
Probably you saw many status updates or comments of your male friends asking what's going on with all girls' statuses. Dear guys, let me explain if any of your female friends haven't yet. Here's the bad news first: It's not what you think. Now comes the truth. There's a viral message that's going around among women around the world. It asks us to answer this question: "Where do you put your purse or handbag when you get home?" Some girls answer that they like it on the couch while others say that they like it on the floor. You get it. Here comes the most critical question: "What's the point?" It might be annoying the guys, but luckily it has a more noble cause: Increasing breast cancer awareness!
Last year, around the same time of the year, there was a similar Facebook action going on: Writing a color on your Facebook status. Although many men couldn't figure out for a while, it was women's bra colors. It was again a conversation among women, it was again catchy for the guys, and it was again in October because October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I know men had some hard times figuring out what was going on, and we, as women, had fun. I want to question something though. Did we really get "more aware" of breast cancer?
What do we mean by being aware of a disease? Is awareness only learning and mentioning the name of it or having information about it? I really appreciate the effort to increase breast cancer awareness by making people have fun; good thinking. But we have to take one step further and think what breast cancer really means. This is why I'm inviting everyone reading this, especially women, to search a little about this disease that is one of the most common and fatal cancer type among women. What are the symptoms? How we can lower the risk? How we can diagnose it? This is what we call awareness.
When we were answering the question in the title as "I like it on the …", was breast cancer really on our minds?