Local breast cancer survivor slams ‘Hold a Coke With Your Boobs Challenge’

A new social media campaign may or may not being raising awareness, but it is raising controversy.

The ‘Hold a Coke With Your Boobs Challenge’ has breast cancer survivors like Kathleen O’Brien of Palm Desert up in arms.

“I’ve never seen anything like this it’s really insulting to women,” said O’Brien.

O’Brien learned about the campaign on Facebook.

“It really is repulsive to turn your Facebook on and see someone with a coke bottle between their boobs with their mouth over the top dancing,” she explained.

The challenge was not originally meant to have any connection to breast cancer. However, the Facebook page that kicked off the campaign encourages women to get mammograms. According to O’Brien, the campaign does nothing for breast cancer awareness. Other people had mixed reactions.

“It will raise awareness,” said Wayne Beissert of Rancho Mirage. “Whether if anything positive comes out of that or not I don’t know.”

O’Brien says friends reached out to the people who started the Facebook page.

“And they got very negative responses and were told that any negative comment about it would be taken off their page,” she said. “Many survivors have posted pictures on that page of their scars showing what breast cancer really is and the awareness and those have been taken off.”

The page has nearly 7,000 likes.