No, ex-colleague, I don’t want to know your bra colour!

I wish I hadn’t checked my Facebook yesterday.

Even though I was immediately disturbed by the bra colour status trend once I worked it out, I was annoyed to catch myself imagining what lies beneath the shirts of several of my female friends and associates, young and old, as I saw their updates.

I can’t help but feel that it created a new platform to objectify millions of women and reduced them to their body parts. Not that I’m advocating bra-shame, but I think we can read between the lines and see who benefits most from these updates.

For those few split seconds it felt like I, a mostly straight woman, was thinking inappropriately about women I’m not even attracted to. I would never ever have visualised these particular women in that way had I not seen their status updates. I just can’t help but wonder if they considered who amongst their friends might be doing the same.

In comments people keep associating it with breast cancer awareness (or at least a reminder to check breasts for lumps) but I found what I think is the original chain message and it does not mention this once. It’s all in the name of ‘fun’ and supposedly ‘awareness’ but I can’t help but wonder, in the interest of improving the status of women, can’t we do better for ourselves than announcing our bra colour to the world?

I was tempted to update my status with ‘Ash – burnt it’ but decided against it