If you don’t already know that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, you must be:
- immune to advertising and marketing blitzes
- someone who never shops – even for groceries
- a person who has never had breast cancer
- a person who has never known anyone close to them with breast cancer
- someone with an aversion to pink
- a guy
- all of the above
From the “Run for the Cure” Komen Foundation to celebrity Sheryl Crow, everyone is talking breasts, showing breasts, and feeling breasts – while marketers are fervently hoping you will spend your way to “the cure,” by squandering your money on an array of make-up, teddy bears, candy, yogurt, jewelry, hats and other crap festooned with fluttery pink ribbons.
Not me.
It’s not that I’m against finding a cure for breast cancer, but people-of-the-pink, let’s get something straight. You aren’t bloody likely to find a cure until you find a cause, (or causes) and that is EXACTLY the line of reasoning the corporate sponsors of pepto-pink-awareness would have you avoid.
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the dirty side of pink in a first-person essay that appeared in Harper’s back in 2001. Since then, the anti-pink movement has grown slowly but steadily.
If you think that breast cancer exists in a disease bubble with no political ramifications for its current and future victims, I urge you to shake the pink rhinestones out of your eyes. Read. Ask questions. Stop buying pink-ribbon crap.
Breast cancer isn’t making us stronger, despite the relentless campaign to celebrate “survivors”. It’s killing us.
I’m with twisty on this, and I’ll be plunking down a chill $24.95 to order Pink Ribbons, Inc. from the University of Minnesota Press. I’m doing it for Mary, Patty, Debra, Virginia and all the other women I’ve known who have faced a diagnosis of breast cancer.
Who will you do it for?
WoW. I checked out the site you linked to, and I’m amazed that I hadn’t really thought about this campaign properly before…
Sharon Batt’s book about breast cancer, breast cancer research and the criminal alliance between medical schools, clinical research and pharmaceutical companies was the first feminist look at the breast cancer INDUSTRY. First published in 1994 in Canada.
Patient No More: The Politics of Breast Cancer
Batt’s examination of the American Cancer Society’s backroom relationship with the National Cancer Institute and its attitude toward women is truly illuminating. Begun early in the century by doctors who wanted to challenge the popular pessimism about cancer, ACS sponsors recruited influential people to advance an optimistic message of hope, even though they were well aware they hadn’t a due how to cure most types of cancer. The obsession with appearance has continued throughout the century. One Reach to Recovery volunteer, for example, was forbidden to visit patients without her prosthesis because, “We like our volunteers to look normal.”
Batt also gives us riveting revelations about professional in-fighting. Surgeons, who once “owned” breast cancer treatment now must jockey for prestige and control with an evercrowded field of specialists, including chemotherapists, radiotherapists, and oncologists. Meanwhile, researchers like to take credit for turning the tide against the radical mastectomy in North America, but it was really lobbying by women that ultimately led to treatment choices.
Sierra Club article:
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/199909/cancer.asp
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