I've never been a fan of all the pink bullshit that surrounds breast cancer in our culture. For one thing, I personally don't really like the color pink, and resent the fact that, as a woman, I'm virtually required to love it, embrace it, wear it, identify with it. I will choose my own color, thanks. Further, I agree with Barbara Ehrenreich that much of the imagery and the products surrounding breast cancer awareness is nothing short of infantilizing. And this is thoroughly infuriating. But of course, it's just the tip of the iceberg, although for me it's come to symbolize my antipathy to the breast cancer industrial complex.
Until recently, my anti-pink stance has been all about the approach of the Susan G Komen Foundations of the world and their ties with big pharma. And this is still the core of my anti-pinkness. Let me be clear about this. The Susan G Komen Foundations of the world, and their corporate beneficiaries, do not want to put an end to breast cancer. That's the very last thing they want. Note that it's not The Race for Prevention or The Race to End Breast Cancer. No. It's The Race for the Cure. Because cures are expensive and ongoing. Cures bring in billions for pharmaceutical companies and their investors - which prominently include Nancy Brinker and her peers. If we discovered the causes of breast cancer, most of which are clearly environmental, and learned how to prevent it, big pharma and its investors would lose out big time. In other words, they don't want women to stop getting breast cancer - they have no interest in reducing the number of cases - they just want to develop better drugs to treat breast cancer. See the difference? And further evidence for the true stance of groups like the Komen Foundation can be found in their resistance to a robust Patient's Bill of Rights, as well as in their resistance to anything like transparency when it comes to their funding and their corporate partnerships.
In addition, the practices that pharmaceutical companies who are active in the breast cancer industrial complex are deeply problematic on their own and, as such, don't deserve a single penny of our money. For instance, companies like Eli Lilly produce and profit from products that are known carcinogens. If they were truly invested in the health and well-being of women, they would no longer be able to manufacture and market a product that causes cancer with one hand, while raking in charitable donations for research on a cure for that cancer with the other hand. And their investors (like, say many prominent breast cancer awareness advocates) would lose one of their most profitable investments. So you see, everyone's interests are at stake here. Everyone except the actual people who have the actual cancer growing in their bodies. They are lost in the shuffle, often treated like mindless automatons who are only of interest because they are hosts to the cancer, and frequently misled about the efficacy and side effects of various treatment options.
Beyond the obvious examples of companies like Eli Lilly, a whole host of companies that embrace the pink ribbon campaign engage in deeply problematic practices. Take a look at all the pinkified products on grocery store shelves right now. Most of these companies knowingly use products that were grown using conventional agricultural practices, which often result in the runoff of chemicals into local waterways and groundwater. And many of these chemicals are known to increase the risks of cancer (including breast cancer) in those who are exposed to them. But nobody is willing to acknowledge this and take a stand against it. And it's not just the agricultural products involved. I would be willing to bet that many of the tools, cleaning products, electronics, office products, etc that are marketed with the pink ribbon are manufactured using methods that lead to industrial runoff that also contributes to the general cancer-causing toxins in our environment. And that's the crux of the issue. None of these companies is willing to put their money where their mouth is. Do you care about breast cancer? Really? Then alter your practices accordingly. If you're not willing to do that, then please don't yammer on about how much you care. It's dishonest and disrespectful of those who actually have cancer.
On top of that, here you have all these companies profiting from both the pollution of the spaces in which we live and the increase in sales and public image that they derive from pinkifying their products, while it's unclear whether they really make any contribution at all. I don't doubt that it's often the case that purchasing these pinkified products really does result in an actual contribution being made to breast cancer pharmaceutical research and awareness. But not always. Many companies use the pink ribbon and the breast cancer marketing theme without actually making any contribution. And nobody is regulating this or tracking who gives what to whom. So you can add extremely dishonest and exploitive marketing practices to my list of beefs with the breast cancer industrial complex.
So basically it comes down to this: the breast cancer industrial complex combines all of the most problematic aspects of unregulated or not-properly regulated capitalism. What began as a worthy cause, an important cause, has been thoroughly co-opted and twisted around into little more than an exploitive marketing and investment scheme. And this hijacking of a worthy cause has been done in the name of all women and feminism, which is the ultimate insult. To take the passionate efforts of early activists who honestly worked to improve the status of breast cancer patients and make important info available and bring public awareness and concern to the disease, and twist that into a complex and powerful money-making machine is as dirty and greedy and self-serving as it gets. So I, for one, am joining the boycott. I already don't go out of my way to buy pinkified products, but at this point I'm so angered by the greed and dishonesty involved, that I resolve not to buy any pinkified products. At all. And I invite you to do the same.
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I understand where you are coming from and I don't support the pharmaceuticals industry having their way with everything in our health care. But here's the thing. Women are always going to get breast cancer because its in our genes. So, things like Susan g Komen are necessary because they do a lot to help the women who are battling breast cancer. You are confusing treatment with cure. While a cure may be expensive in the long run the pharmaceutical companies lose money because people who battle the disease more than once continue to bring in money for the companies, versus patients who only battle it once, are cured and never have to worry about it again. Whereas treatment, only temporarily relieves the disease and it will come back again. Does that make sense?
My friends who work in the field tell me the estimated role of genetics is 10% at most. And everything I've read in scientific journals agrees with this. So I agree that some women will always get breast cancer, but the rising rates of cancers has much much more to do with environmental factors. And the pharmaceutical companies have been known to try to actively block research on prevention through limiting of environmental toxins. So I respectfully disagree with you on that point.
At the same time, I do agree that a cure would be nice. But of course, currently we have nothing even remotely resembling a cure, and given that the bigger cause seems to be environmental, it only makes sense that we should be working on both a cure (a real cure) and on prevention. However, funding the same companies that are manufacturing carcinogenic toxins to do this research is ridiculous. And lining your own pockets through your "advocacy work" is profoundly offensive.
I agree! And the commodification of fundraising, especially all of the pink items for breast cancer, seems rather underhanded. They make something pink and then give $1 of the proceeds to the fundraiser. It's disheartening.
Drive through activism is one of the many targets you cite and I can't impress upon anyone reading this enough that making a needed change is not a question of expending the minimum possible effort. Taking to the streets is one thing, but modifying your daily routine and daily consumption is a big sacrifice, but one that I am convinced is what it takes to really foster systemic change.
You're making some pretty serious charges there - do you have any actual evidence to back up your conspiratorialist opinion that drug companies do not want to cure breast cancer?
When I was teaching at UC Irvine about 6 years ago documents circulated around campus showing how two of the pharmaceutical conglomerates had threatened to withdraw funding from several research projects going on at Johns Hopkins because they were also launching research on the role of agricultural chemicals in breast and cervical cancer. The clear implication was that prevention would decrease the market share these companies projected for themselves in these areas, so they were putting heavy implicit pressure on institutions who did this research to focus only on medical treatments. These two drug conglomerates were also major beneficiaries of the Komen foundation, and prominent holdings in Nancy Brinker's investment portfolio. This led to a lot of the faculty who had been planning on participating in the walk for the cure withdrawing that year. Representatives of the industry obviously denied that they had ever pressured any research institutions to avoid studying prevention, but you'll notice that still the vast majority of the work and funding on cancer is not on prevention, but on pharmaceutical treatments. I'm not saying we shouldn't be studying treatments, but given the fact that the rates of diagnosis are rising, it's obvious that there are environmental causes, and we should be working just as hard on prevention as we are on treatment. But prevention doesn't make anyone any money, so the emphasis will always be on treatment, as long as we allow the industry to dictate our actions and goals. Which is clearly what the Komen Foundation and their ilk do.
And thanks for calling me a conspiracy theorist.
I can back you up on this. My mother (may her memory always be a blessing) organized a conference called "Eyes Wide Open: Breast Cancer And The Environment", on behalf of the hospital where she worked. Her keynote speaker was Dr. Samuel Epstein, who is a vocal opponent of the "cure-before-prevention" mentality. The CIBC Run For The Cure was a sponsor of the conference, until they heard that Dr. Epstein would be speaking. They ordered my mother to take him off the roster, she said "Eff you", and they pulled their sponsorship.
It's a bit unfair to refer to this as conspiratorial. I work in an evolutionary bio lab, and it's fairly common knowledge even in my area that the pharmas are hostile to research on prevention. Researchers must always carefully regulate their work in order to avoid losing funding for political reasons like this, unless they have funding sources that are entirely independent of the industry. And that's pretty rare.
I really felt the framing devise of the color pink here was... Well, let's just say that on my list of "evils against humanity", the color divide of genders comes far below drug companies knowingly eliminating and/or restricting access to life saving information. I mean, really, it almost seems petty to bring cultural obsessions with pink into a discussion about human lives being sacrificed for profit.
I guess I'm not sure I understand your question. I didn't choose the color pink to represent the breast cancer industrial complex - they did. To the best of my knowledge, all the pink ribbon stuff, and the subsequent pinkification of all these products, was started by the Komen foundation. And it's the founders and organizers of the Komen foundation that has been shown to have financial ties to the oncology industry, and to profit from more women, not less women, being diagnosed with breast cancer. So the pink boycott involves people not buying the pinkified products, partially because of this profiting from disease and death, and partially because of the deep dishonesty involved in so many of the pink marketing campaigns. So the idea is not to boycott anything that just happens to be pink, but to boycott the pink campaign and instead support companies and institutions that are truly invested in prevention and cures and aren't just in it for the money.
I think you misunderstood the post. The Pink Boycott is specifically a boycott of the breast cancer awareness campaigns as they are done by the big groups like Komen. It's not a larger statement about the color itself or anything like that.
I respect your decision but feel you should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Here is a link to the McGrath foundation's catalogue: http://www.mcgrathfoundation.com.au/catalog/
There's not a lot there that isn't simply about raising awareness. The money they raise doesn't go to drug companies, but rather to employing nurses specially trained to help those diagnosed with breast cancer.
I'm not a particularly big fan of the gender divide along colour. But this campaign has had some interesting side-effects. They've had (male and female) international cricketers using pink bat handles to raise money and awareness for a while. Now I am beginning to see quite a few guys in club cricket using the same colour grips on their bats. So, that actually seems to be popularising pink for men.
I don't doubt that there are some organizations out there that are honest and truly work to improve things - apart from their own personal profit. And I have no problem supporting them. But simply buying all the pinkified stuff you see in the stores during October will generally only support either the company who's selling the product, or that company and the pharmaceutical companies that have been chosen by groups like the Komen Foundation. And that's what I object to. Companies shouldn't profit from hijacking an important cause.
Sorry, this was supposed to be a reply to Kandela.
I agree. And aggressive treatments for breast cancer can be harmful in and of themselves. My grandmother was encouraged by her doctor to get an extremely aggressive course of chemo. Honestly, for the type of cancer she had, it was likely overkill and it damaged her heart. I've heard about this happening to other women as well. There is a culture of fear surrounding breast cancer, in part created by big pharma. Other cancers are much more deadly, yet society spends more time talking about breast cancer than, say, lung cancer.
Joan
My mother received hormone replacement therapy for menopause, which (her doctors say) most likely caused her non-genetic breast cancer. To treat her breast cancer, she was given Tamoxifen. That drug gave her endometrial cancer, for which she is currently being treated. I realize this is merely an anecdote, but her doctors were never once surprised at her cancerous outcomes, so yes, I'm very suspicious of the drug companies, and our health care system in general.
Yes. Tamoxifen has many critics and is linked to uterine cancer. But AstraZeneca, a partner of the Komen Foundation, is very powerful and pushed it through in spite of the well-founded fears and resistance.
Finding a cure for neoplasia is futile. Every living organism experiences age and genetic mutation; it's the driving force for life and survival. I agree that treatment and prevention should be targetted, not "finding a cure" because that day will never come.
I definitely support this and have done similar steps in my own life because coloring something pink has now made me skeptical.
This type of co-option is not uncommon for any of the Big Scary Common Diseases in the Western World. It's like how everything is suddenly deep red in December for AIDS day and suddenly all sorts of companies care about HIV/AIDS. The pharmas look for new ARV treatments to control HIV/AIDS so they can make bank off of someone with a life-long illness, but there are no pharmas looking for the cure to the disease.
Control and treatment is better for a corporation than a cure, however much a patent on a cure would fill the coffers of a pharma. The long-term is in the drug treatments, not the drug solutions.
I never thought I would read a post like this, with someone objecting to the Pink Ribbon stuff. I think it's great. (Your post, not the Pink crap.) I've always been very sceptical of all this Breast Cancer Awareness propaganda I always see floating around, usually with a pink ribbon attached to it. I've always gotten the impression that Breast Cancer is such an Evil Evil Cancer That Must Be Cured simply because it's breast cancer, so many times women have to get their breasts removed (sorry, I forgot the medical term for that.) Oh noes! Women are getting their boobs removed! Men, it's time to start fighting to cure Breast Cancer! You're losing all the boobs!
I don't know. I personally don't have breast cancer, nor do I know anyone that has ever dealt with it. So if I'm being out of line, I'm sorry. But that's always the impression I got from it. Especially since it's breast cancer, not any other kind of cancer. What about colon cancer? I learned in my biology class that colon cancer is the most prevelant kind of cancer in this country. So...where's all the ribbons for colon cancer? Where's the Race for the Cure for Colon Cancer? Is it because colons aren't nearly as fun to look at as breasts?
Another thing: what makes breast cancer so special? Why is breast cancer a worst disease then, say, another form of cancer? Or epilepsy? I have epilepsy, and I can tell you right now that no one gives a shit about epilepsy unless they have it or someone close to them has it. I know first hand that doctor's don't know ANYTHING about epilepsy. I've asked my doctor so many questions about it, I've asked him why I started having seizures to begin with, and so many times all I get is a "we just don't know that much about it." How very comforting. Maybe if epilepsy threatened the state of my breasts the research would get more funding. Or maybe I'm just bitter.