Everyone who is “unaware” of BREAST CANCER, raise your hand… thought so.
I have enough issues with the wonderful world of retailing that I don’t need to see a sea of pink products reminding us to think about BREAST CANCER for yet another month.
I propose that if we have to have a full month of BREAST CANCER AWARENESS every year, that we quit screwing around with pink batteries, pink dusters, pink shopping bags, pink soap, pink socks, pink tools, pink everything…
…and require BREAST CANCER AWARENESS to be raised by putting a handsome color photo of a breast - say, one of that year’s Miss October’s - on every retail product in the store.
After all, the entire purpose is to sell more product and make people feel good in that useless, save-the-pull-tabs way, so we may as well move on from pink to boob. The retail world and ACS and Komen seem to take us all for boobs in this respect, so let’s put a little real boob in the mix.
Google Carly Lauren images then, or Standard Photoshopped Plastic Playboy Blonde images (same thing). It shouldn’t be long before HNSFW images are available; it’s the newest issue.
What we need, obviously, is Greater Color Perception Awareness, so that fine Pantone shades can be assigned to the 10,000 and growing Awareness Ribbons.
That’s right, we need an awareness ribbon awareness effort.
The one which made me roll my eyes yesterday-- kitchen towels with lovely pumpkins and gourds, which say Faith, Hope, Charity, etc. and the pumpkins and gourds are all pink.
So where’s the outrage, the walks, the cutesie ribbons on every package?
The assumption that pink = women and all women love pink also bugs me. I actively avoid the whole marketing gambit, I won’t buy something with “special” pink packaging unless I really have no alternative.
Don’t forget the komen/planned parenthood debacle last year. After fundraising over $20k for them over a 3-year period, I will never give them another dime.
In all seriousness, it’s the combination that bothers me. There’s no evidence that “Breast Cancer Awareness” has changed a single person’s life; I think it would be hard to be an adult woman in a Western nation without having been made aware of the need for “awareness.” Like most health risks that can remain hidden, it does need some awareness effort, but as saje put it well, no more so than at least a dozen other silent killers.
Couple that with the fact that we’ve made almost zero progress on cancer since the maturation of testing and surgical intervention, and the whole notion of hyper-awareness gets a little absurd.
Couple that with the massive and overwhelming marketing tool the whole “Paint It Pink” movement has created, and the fact that it feeds and benefits retail marketing a lot more than the welfare of past, present or future cancer victims.
And hitch on the whole concept of trival-to-useless feel-good efforts boosted in place of anything that might really be effective or meaningful, and… gah.
ETA: And then face up to the fact that if you express these kind of negative sentiments in general public, you get branded as some kind of insensitive misogynist, or anti-feminist, or worse. Don’t screw with people’s feel-goods, that’s the message.
Myself, I have no trouble with people brandishing a lot of pink stuff and with a heap of events being described as *"______ for the cure" *using exactly those three words… ESPECIALLY if done with no attribution or benefit whatsoever to the Komen organization.
Otherwise, however, kindly leave me alone with the thinly disguised demand that I had better get my pink on or subscribe with the rest of the office for the walk/run. My sister just went trough treatment for it, my awareness could be raised no higher.
Dammit! I just wrote a whole long thing and then lost it (snarl):mad:
Short version:
Breast cancer does seem to strike young women more than the others, which ups the suckitude. (Not 100% sure about ovarian/uterine statistics though).
A friend’s 28 yo daughter was recently diagnosed w/ stage IV breast cancer w/ metastases, and it’s unutterably cruel. This girl had the world by the balls, and she’ll be lucky to live another 5 years. She’s keeping a blog that is well worth the read (or even a skim): Welcome | Words From Ward Four
I actually like the color pink, and I think it’s a stupid gimmick.
I got these really cute exercise tops in two different shades of pink, the only problem was the ugly breast cancer ribbon on the front of each of them. Totally cramps my style.
I’ve seen a lot of good feminist critiques of the breast cancer movement. Probably one of the best ones came from a woman who was actively dying of breast cancer, sort of resenting the implication that breast cancer is this thing that can be ‘‘overcome’’ with guuurl power. She’d have experiences where her ‘‘negativity’’ was not appreciated by other breast cancer survivors. You know, when she was talking about how much it sucked to be dying of breast cancer. Then there’s the association of these movements with ultra-feminine gender roles, lipstick high-heels and motherhood. A lot of people end up left out. There are women who are lucky enough that they get to be ultra-positive and see it as a source of their strength. But there are also women who are bitter and angry and have every right to feel that way.
