The colour of crass commercialism

For a while, I have become increasingly disturbed by the commercialization of the Breast Cancer Pink Ribbon campaign. Instinctively, I shied away from the pink products because they reeked of Stepford Wife. I was going to work out my more reasonable objections in a blog entry before Samantha King beat me to it with an eloquent article in The Toronto Star.

Excerpts from the article:

The cheerfulness and consumer-oriented character of breast cancer survivor culture can be enormously alienating to women who do not have the financial means or networks of social support to participate in it, not to mention unintentionally working to denigrate those who have "failed" to survive.

This particular problem has been magnified considerably by corporate interest in the disease. [...] Sickness and death do not sell, but images of survivors who are uniformly youthful, ultrafeminine, immaculately groomed, radiant with health, and seemingly at peace with the world, do.

The effect of breast cancer marketing campaigns is to erase from public consciousness the fact that incidence rates remain stubbornly high and newly diagnosed women face essentially the same options — surgery, radiation, chemotherapy — that they did 40 years ago.

That mortality rates have been declining slightly since the early 1990s offers little comfort to the estimated 22,000 Canadian women who will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006.

People often point to the good work that breast cancer campaigns perform in raising "awareness" and argue that regardless of the accompanying messages, pink ribbon products and 5k runs raise large amounts of money for a good cause.

But this position raises its own set of questions: What exactly are we being asked to gain awareness of? And how is the money being spent? For those campaigns and events that venture into specifics, awareness usually means preaching the benefits of early detection through mammograms.

Although [mammograms] might prompt people to discover if they already have breast cancer, this selective brand of awareness asks individuals to take personal
responsibility for fending off the disease, while ignoring tougher questions related to what might be done to prevent it in the first place.

I couldn't have said it better myself.