Tag Archives: cancer

Pink Ribbon Culture? Who Benefits? Not People with Breast Cancer

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Debbie says:

soupKaruna Jaggar of Breast Cancer Action has harsh words for what she calls “pink-ribbon culture.” See #6 for her definition of the stronger term “pinkwashing.”

Jaggar lays out the numbers:

Each year, 250,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer. Up to one-third of all breast cancers will metastasize (spread beyond the breast into the rest of the body); it is metastatic breast cancer that kills women. Black women are 40 percent more likely to die of breast cancer than their white counterparts. And each year, 40,000 women die of breast cancer, despite all the awareness and pink ribbons.

She gives a good history of the (admirable) roots of the pink ribbon, and goes on to list ” six ways that pink ribbon culture distracts from meaningful progress on breast cancer.” Here are two of them:

2. Corporations exploit concern about breast cancer for profit. Each October, marketers take advantage of people’s sincere concern about breast cancer to make money and generate good publicity. Anyone can put a pink ribbon on anything, and they do—from handguns to garbage trucks, from perfume to toilet paper. But there is no transparency or accountability about where the pink ribbon money goes. Sometimes no money at all from the purchase goes to a breast cancer organization. But even if the company does make a donation, most of these promotions ultimately benefit corporations far more than they help women living with and at risk of breast cancer.

6. Some pink ribbon products are linked to causing breast cancer. Years ago, Breast Cancer Action came up with a term for this, pinkwashing: the outrageous corporate practice of selling products linked to an increased risk of breast cancer while claiming to care about (and profiting from) breast cancer. This year, we are challenging two giant agricultural companies who are using leftover wastewater from oil corporations to irrigate their citrus—while also using pink ribbons to sell them.

(To be clear, I have no reason to believe that Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup causes cancer; I just love the Warhol-ish absurdity of the photo at the top of this blog.)

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Dana Bolger at Feministing (who has previously profiled Jaggar), takes a moment to highlight just how far pink-ribbon October culture can go:

I wish I could say pinkwashing has reached new heights here (get it), but this is nothing new. Last year, Massachusetts cops introduced pink handcuffs (because where do women get better healthcare than… in prison?). And the year before that, Susan G. Komen teamed up with a fracking company to give us pink drill bits (and oh yeah also carcinogenic toxins).

Yep, that’s right, the U.S. military, known far and wide for its concern for human life (women’s or otherwise).  Jaggar shares an image at the link to her article of a pink handgun sold as part of a “breast cancer awareness kit.”

If you wear a ribbon as a memory of your own breast cancer experiences, or to honor someone you love, or to increase your own awareness of the scope and depth of the issue,  I support you, and I feel sure Jaggar and Bolger do so as well. Its the shameless co-optation of a loving symbol to shore up a deeply anti-human set of corporate goals and objectives we despise. It’s the eagerness to embrace a symbol while doing nothing for people with breast cancer (not all of whom are women), and doing nothing to clean up the toxins we deal with every day.  Perhaps worse, it’s the tacit permission for people to substitute shallow “awareness” for real, engaged concern.

When the Medical News Is Not about Weight

Debbie says:

Cancer risk news is everywhere (because cancer is so common, and so scary). Most early articles linking increased cancer risk to anything will turn out not to be true, or to be overstated, or hugely influenced by other factors. So, I wasn’t as interested in this article because of what it says as because of how it says it. The article, from that used-to-be-a-major-news-source magazine known as Time, is about links between cancer risk and height: “New research published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention found a surprising correlation between height and cancer risk among postmenopausal women; the taller the woman, the greater her risk for the disease.”

It seems to be a good enough study; it’s based on the Women’s Health Initiative data, so it’s a large pool and (as far as I can tell from a superficial article) the methodology was reasonable enough. If the article was about weight (which is constantly linked to cancer), it would end with what our own Lynne Murray calls “the faith sentence,” the capper to an article that reinforces what the writer and/or the researchers believe. In the cancer/weight articles, it is usually “proper attention to diet, weight and lifestyle management would save so many lives,” or words to that effect. In weight articles, the faith sentence is a club, used to remind you that your cancer (or whatever) is your fault and you just aren’t managing yourself properly. Here’s the American Cancer Society’s version:

While we still have much to learn about the link between weight loss and cancer risk, people who are overweight or obese should be encouraged and supported if they try to lose weight. Aside from possibly reducing cancer risk, losing weight can have many other health benefits, such as lowering the risk of other chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes. Losing even a small amount of weight has health benefits and is a good place to start.

In the Time article, we see a very different faith sentence.

[Dr. Thomas] Rohan, [chair and professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine] and his colleagues say the study doesn’t imply that cancer is inevitable for every tall woman. The study found an association, not a cause-and-effect relationship. And it’s unlikely that diseases as complex as cancer can be traced to just one developmental process such as growth.

In other words, ladies, your height is not your fault, so we need an ending sentence that tells you not to worry too much, and not to assume you are doomed. If the same sentence was used as the closure for an article about the risks of fat in any area of health, it would say:

[Experts] say the study doesn’t imply that [this disease] is inevitable for every fat woman. The study found an association, not a cause-and-effect relationship. And it’s unlikely that diseases as complex as [this one] can be traced to just one developmental process such as body size. While losing weight has known health benefits, it also has associated health risks, and has been regularly demonstrated not to be reliably possible, even in very carefully controlled conditions.

The great thing about this faith sentence is that it’s true.