pink washing

Post-Pink Ribbon

Breast cancer awareness month is waning. Last week, at my neighborhood post office, I stood in line staring at a battered, two-foot-long, cardboard pink ribbon taped to the wall. Holding my nephew’s birthday present, waiting for my turn, gazing at the decoration’s tattered edges and sloppy tape, I felt – nothing.

I am post-pink ribbon. I just don’t give a f**k. Anger spent on pink ignorance zaps my energy. I want to channel my energy into life. Theresa Brown summed up the pink insult in yesterday’s New York Times, “Pink is about femininity; cancer is about staying alive.”

In December 2015, my friend Cindy was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy. We talked on the phone. We compared notes on treatment side effects. We walked her dog. She got through it with grace and wit. She returned to work. All seemed well.

Six months later she had an odd pain in her rib cage. Worry chafed her voice as she described the sensation. I don’t remember what I said. I tried to be optimistic without being dismissive. We both lived with the fear of metastasis. We both knew what bone pain might mean.

Two weeks ago I was reading Sherman Alexie’s beautiful new memoir, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” when this passage jumped out at me:

Nobody defeats cancer. There is no winning or losing. There is no surviving or not surviving. There are only coin flips: heads or tails; benign or malignant; weight loss or bloating; morphine or oxycodone; extreme rescue efforts or Do Not Resuscitate; live or die.

Cindy lost the coin flip. Her cancer had spread to her bones.

Before Cindy was my friend, she was my physical therapist. She restored the range of motion in my left arm after radiation. She released the scar tissue across my chest from my double mastectomy. She reduced the swelling in my arm when lymphedema settled in for a visit. She was one of the most compassionate and talented healers I’d ever met and I’ve met quite a few.

She’d rubbed shoulders with the disease most of her life. Her mother had suffered from breast cancer. Cindy had spent much of her career as a physical therapist helping breast cancer patients regain freedom in their post-treatment bodies.

Cindy was in her late 50s when she was diagnosed. She had a son in college, a daughter in high school. We often talked about the future, her excitement about her new solo physical therapy practice and her dream of spending more quality time with her husband now that her children were grown.

Cindy died this month. She was 61.

Reject the commodification of women’s pain

Anyone who has lost a loved one to this disease knows breast cancer is not pink; to festoon  kitty litter, vibrators, and fire engines with pink ribbons eats away at the gravitas of this disease. It’s the opposite of awareness; it’s erasure.

Breast cancer is about staying alive. Who lives and who dies has nothing to do with who “fights like a girl” or who “kicks cancer’s ass.” Staying alive is a coin toss. This year 40,610 women in the U.S. will lose their coin flip with breast cancer. Let’s focus on them.

 

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The Futility of Pinktober

Every year, during Pinktober, I worry that we’ve lost sight of the reality of breast cancer. This year I have a writer crush on S. Lochlainn Jain, an associate professor at UC Santa Cruz and author of Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. In a few well-chosen statistics, Jain shows the heartbreak of breast cancer and the futility of our obsession with “the cure.”

“The numbers really are staggering. Just to take an example of one cancer: 200,000 new diagnoses and 41,000 annual deaths of breast cancer each year in the United States, a million or more American women living with it who have no idea they are ill. More than 6,000 women under the age of 49 dead of the disease each year — more than the number of AIDS-related deaths at the height of the crisis, and twice that of the annual deaths of polio at the height of that crisis. And yet the response has not been to reconsider the costs of our economic and environmental decisions but to concentrate of that elusive thing: the Cure. The promise of the curable disease, the triumphant figure of the survivor, and the rhetoric of hope all serve as part of the rhetorical work of maintaining a belief in the preciousness of each individual life. The bad faith, though, reveals itself in contradictions: the statistics built from drug trials on the one hand point out how far we are from a cure and on the other harbor the possibility that cure is possible. And yet, as researchers such as Robert Proctor argue, very little basic research on cancer is being done. One might reasonably conclude that the rhetoric of hope for a cure papers-over the actuality that after all these years, for many cancers chemotherapy treatments have improved very little, and they have improved survival rates only marginally, if at all.

This excerpt appears as a footnote in Jain’s essay “Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegiac Politics,”

Avon’s Charity Walk of Shame

Corporate-sponsored charity walks do a disservice to many women. Look what just arrived in my mailbox…a pinkalicious mailer from Avon guilting women into walking on my behalf. “Will you walk? Or will you walk away?” Brilliant way to push our collective guilt/shame button. Thanks Avon!

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Thanks too for perpetuating misinformation about breast cancer for your company’s benefit. That’s awesome! Surely your savvy marketing team knows that the 1 in 8 stat is misleading. If your mission is to educate women about breast health, why perpetuate bad information? Breast Cancer Action considers the 1-in-8 stat one of the Top 10 Breast Cancer Myths. Here’s what BCA says:

“This much-quoted statistic is an individual’s cumulative risk over an 85-year lifetime. It does not mean that at any given point, 1 of every 8 women has breast cancer. Rather, it means that if all women lived to be 85, one in eight would develop the disease sometime during her life.”

Shame on you Avon for using this misleading statistic to scare women into contributing to your cause. 

 

What The Cluck?

Holy crap. I thought pink washing had hit rock bottom, but cause marketers have one-upped themselves with a new pinkwashing campaign linking Kentucky Fried Chicken to the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

KFC’s campaign, called Buckets for the Cure, donates 50 cents to the Komen Foundation for every pink bucket “purchased by restaurant operators” between April 5th and May 30th, 2010. In an effort to raise $8 million in six weeks, according to Komen’s web site, “The lids of these special pink buckets will have a call to action to get involved. Names of breast cancer survivors and those who have lost their battle with breast cancer will be listed on the sides of the bucket.”

The same bucket that packs up to 2,400 calories and 160 grams of fat. Hello? Does anyone at Komen care that obesity causes breast cancer? Or are they too busy selling us out to the lowest bidder? Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up. The web site comes complete with a rotating pink bucket of fried chicken plastered with thumbnail-sized pictures of breast cancer survivors. Click on the picture to find out more about these poor saps being manipulated by the marketing geniuses at KFC.

I borrowed my blog headline from the clever folks at Breast Cancer Action who’ve skewered breast cancer marketers for years with their “think before you pink” campaign. The non-profit’s web site notes that Buckets for the Cure is “especially egregious because KFC, like most fast food chains, is overwhelmingly present in communities that have poor health outcomes.”  Click here to visit Breast Cancer Action’s web site and send KFC and Susan G. Komen an email telling them where they can stuff their bucket.