You are just a big meanie who hates breasts and anything soft.
Is what people might say.
Most people don’t know that breast cancer is not just a women’s disease. It’s diagnosed about 1,000 times a year in men in the United States.
Original KISS drummer Peter Criss has spoken extensively about this; he for one did not know that the disease existed until he was diagnosed with it.
Best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich is a BCS, and when she was diagnosed, she was given what amounted to a souvenir catalogue, and she’s said many times that the “Breast Cancer Bear” was the most demeaning thing she had ever seen.
The way WC Fields, Dean Martin and Norm hated alcohol.
Absolutely nothing demeaning intended, but people who come down with a widely occurring illness and suddenly get very vocally, personally public about it don’t arouse any special sympathy in me, nor do I regard them as selfless public spokesbeings. They are like every other person who was dealt a sudden and unexpected hurt, and worth every bit of individual sympathy and understanding, but their tumor doesn’t give them a halo or (necessarily) a worthwhile voice.
ETA: Especially when, as in the case of breast cancer, all they can do is flog tired maxims about “awareness” and “doing something.” If 50+ years of research hasn’t found The Cure, your blog, t-shirt and bumper sticker sure ain’t gonna.
Well, my awareness is aroused.
I second this OP.
Sheayyhh… White people suck!!
A local (Chicago area) hospital group has big-ass pink banners all over Union Station with the tagline Stories of the Girls. Tee-hee. Aren’t you clever. :rolleyes:
I hate the commercialization and marketing of a disease as something cutesy. Plus lots of these products don’t even help anything breast cancer-related all that much.
The ones that “legitimately” use the ribbon, color and come-on donate some related fraction of sales to ACS and/or Komen. There is widespread… well, is it piracy if you decide to sell your product in pink shrinkwrap during October? Let’s call it coat-tailing. Awareness drafting. Stealth awareness.
Or just another retailing shuck. It takes us months to get rid of pink packaging after a typical October, even trying to avoid the boobie brands.
It’s helped raise a little money for basic research. That might have sped progress and save a few lives. I know a bloke who runs in the various 5K and 10K runs, and occasional marathons, and he gets some non-trivial pledges.
It may be a small contribution, but why not? At least it isn’t doing any harm, is it?
(I suppose one might object that, in a zero-sum world of limited donations, it’s taking away money that might go to some other life-saving research. Ah, well: let the free market sort it out…)
Aren’t most of the consumers who buy the Pink Shit women? I’m pretty sure that putting pictures of titties on products would result in fewer sales to women. Yeah, some men might buy the shit, but not enough to make up for the loss of the women’s dollars.
I don’t support Komen any more. PP was one of their greatest allies in fighting breast cancer. I did give PP $250 this year, after listening to Mike Huckabee foam at the mouth about them on the radio.
Vanishingly small, against government grants and major philanthropic donations. It also tends to go to ACS, which is the poster child for, “Well, this approach hasn’t worked before but if we run 100 more trials on it we might learn something.”
Being benign doesn’t mean it’s good. As you say, at a certain point it’s drawing donations away from other needful and productive charities and efforts, and to very little end purpose. For every case of someone “contributing” to The Cure for their feel-good instead of finding a less-hawked, more worthy charity, it’s arguably a negative.
I always assumed women were smart enough to see through it, and all the Pink Shit was bought by men (for women).
I think it might appeal more to women - women who haven’t really thought it through and think no further than “helping fight breast cancer is good.” Which is all the retail hustlers want you to think about such things, really.
Plus, their bullshit aggressive “defending” of the “for the Cure” trademark.
Ditto mothers of autistic children.
Someone wrote a letter to my local newspaper stating that women die from breast cancer because of sexism, and a local oncologist replied, “You can have regular screenings and still die. You can have a woman doctor and still die. You can BE a woman doctor and still die.”
And the last I heard, men still die from testicular and prostate cancer, and I don’t see anyone screaming sexism there, do I?
This was the disease that killed Farrah Fawcett. 
Yes. I failed to say above that it’s become a great deal more about the retailing opportunity than anything else. At all. That’s why it’s a bad thing/does harm; it is using a real, deadly, widespread disease to sell batteries and swiffers. Even on my scale, that’s egregious and filthy.
Especially the ones that bypassed all the effective therapies for the feel-good ones and now have no idea what to do with their lethally large and strong 15-year-old who goes off when she runs out of strawberry jam. It was too much trouble to stick with an ABA program; much more fun to go ride horsies and put puzzle ribbons on the car. And now whine about it in a blog.
I don’t and never have gotten this one. Women tend to see doctors more than men and every woman I’ve known has bitched because their PC or Gyno was forever after them about pelvics and mammograms. Where does “sexism” let women die of an unheralded breast tumor?
Here is Coventry, Rhode Island we have a full sized, completely fitted out, hook and ladder, pink …
… fire truck.
Shoot me now.
That actually kind of cool. Pink police cars would be cooler though.
We have that as well. They usually appear as a team.