Today, the trending topics on Twitter inform me, is #NoBraDay, a day where women are encouraged not to wear a bra because… breast cancer awareness, or something. You can probably feel me rolling my eyes through the page.
I’ve tried to discern where this meme came from. It doesn’t appear to have originated with any actual breast cancer charities or campaigns. All I can find is that some dude invented it in 2011. And even that article manages to conflate it with an actual breast cancer awareness project, Breast Reconstruction Awareness Day, which falls on the 15th and is marked by breast cancer survivors talking about their experiences and their decisions about reconstruction after mastectomy.
In short, this “awareness day” is full of shit. Everyone enthused by it is just banging on about “setting their tatas free”, and it smacks of how Page 3 in the Sun now runs a “Check ’em Tuesday”, where, by the medium of a topless woman, we are encouraged to check our boobs (I am not sure the Sun got the target audience of this message quite right).
This is a quite common thread in breast cancer campaigns, the line which goes “boobs are great, make sure they stay great, yay boobs”, and it’s a crass one. It’s a classic patriarchal line, the notion that our bodies and our tits are there as sex objects, and nothing more. Forget about health, the message is that breasts are cute and sexy.
So today, do whatever the fuck you like with your norks, as I hope you always do. Go braless, wear a bra, bind them, get surgery… whatever the fuck you want. They’re your boobs, and what you do with them isn’t going to kill someone from cancer.
Another angry woman 
There are not enough “LIKES” in the world to show how I feel about the point you are making.