This is possibly the world's most distasteful breast cancer awareness campaign

The #HoldACokeWithYourBoobsChallenge was started by model Gemma Jaxx and her colleague Danny Frost, who work for an adult talent-scouting company, as a joke.

Now, it has morphed into a breast cancer awareness drive described by Playboy as the "sexiest breast cancer awareness campaign to date" (sic).

The 'challenge' is exactly what it sounds like - asking users to post selfies while they hold a Coke (can or bottle) with their breasts. And most of the pictures are exactly as NSFW as you'd expect.

While the hashtag was apparently started as a way to mock social media campaigns such as the Kylie Jenner lips challenge, it caught on and Frost and Jaxx claim people began to mention breast cancer awareness while posting pictures.

"We never thought it would take off like it did. But it did. And then people started posting it was for charity and it was for breast cancer awareness. We had never plan on that nor thought of it. But since that's what people want to do it for, we said why not do something good with this. So we went with it. Please challenge your friends to do it," they said in a joint Facebook post.

Jezebel had a different take on the challenge, noting: "We are already aware of breast cancer and taking off your shirt isn’t going to make us any more aware of it."

The site also questioned whether the challenge's association with breast cancer was as organic as Frost and Jaxx describe, saying "the only time I saw anything really relating to breast cancer awareness was on a Russian woman’s Instagram".

Much has been written in the past of the dangers of sexualising breast cancer, with Karuna Jagger of the American advocacy group Breast Cancer Action saying in 2012: "The implicit message in these campaigns is that it is breasts that are sexy; sexy is what is important; and we should care about breast cancer because it takes those lovely, sexy breasts out of the world."

A spokesperson for Breast Cancer Care, however, said we should celebrate that the internet offers opportunities for people to raise awareness.

It is brilliant that the internet and social media give people the tools and opportunity to create their own campaigns to raise awareness and funds for charities. But this is not a campaign we are involved with.

However they added: "There’s nothing sexy about going through breast cancer":

Hm...

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