unknowablewoman:

rubyvroom:

tooyoungforthelivingdead:

If you don&rsquo;t know much about the history of the pink ribbon, or the massive cause marketing facets it has, then you need to watch this film.
The fight against breast cancer has been depoliticised. Pushes from pharma companies to produce a &ldquo;cure&rdquo;, combined with corporate links with fundraising campaigns, have fundamentally shifted the debate and public awareness of the disease.
History of the ribbon: corporate appropriation
The Guardian covered this in their recent article Cancer&rsquo;s not pink:

The pink ribbon was originally orange. Conceived in 1990 by Charlotte Haley, a 68-year-old American, it was a grassroots protest against the fact that only 5% of the US National Cancer Institute&rsquo;s budget was going towards cancer prevention.
When Est&eacute;e Lauder asked to use the logo for a breast-cancer awareness campaign, Haley wanted nothing to do&nbsp;with it, saying she had no wish for them to use the ribbon as she felt it was too commercial. So the company changed the colour to pink, because research identified it as the most non-threatening, soothing colour &ndash; everything a cancer diagnosis isn&rsquo;t.

Estee Lauder threatened Charlotte with their vast squad of lawyers, and then just evaded the legalities by slightly changing the colour.
From the start, a symbol tainted by corporate appropriation.
Cause marketing: framing it nice
Charities like Susan G Komen for the Cure (recently famous for their decision to not back Planned Parenthood) are largely responsible for the links between breast cancer fundraising and corporate cause marketing i.e. &lsquo;buy this and part of the profits go to a good cause&rsquo;.
The bottom line is that these companies only enter these partnerships because they are lucrative.
To be an effective sales tool, breast cancer needs to be portrayed as beatable. Positivity and reassurance mean that&nbsp;the more you buy, the more you&rsquo;re helping is the dominant philosophy.
An off-shoot problem is that the focus on positivity is that it:
creates a frame of &lsquo;the more I fight the more likely I am to succeed&rsquo;, which promotes victim-blaming when it fails e.g. &ldquo;oh you should have eaten more green veg&rdquo;;
implies all breast cancer is always treatable and beatable;
softens something ugly and difficult, and invalidates the very valid feelings of anger people have.
This sanitising from corporate links took the teeth out of the growing movement pushing for prevention rather than a &ldquo;cure&rdquo;, and shifted focus from preventative options.
&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not a conspiracy, it&rsquo;s business as usual&rdquo;
Popular focus on the disease being beatable on one level encourages the quick fix self-help ideas you hear in the papers: &ldquo;eat more fruit and veg&rdquo;, &ldquo;do more exercise&rdquo;, etc.
What most people don&rsquo;t know is that only 20-30% of breast cancer is caused by known risk factors. However, publicising this would undermining the public perception of the disease being manageable, and thus undermine the potential profits from cause marketing.
This focus on 