My son, Jordan, does not remember a time his mother was not a
breast cancer survivor or a children’s book author. He and his sister, Tabitha, have an impressive
resume of marketable skills they acquired while helping me establish NutcrackerPublishing Company.
 |
| Jordan helping me out with a summer science camp group. |
While still in elementary school they were pros at
collecting book sale money at speaking engagements, or creating and selling
balloon animals at fundraising events, and my daughter’s personal favorite
(NOT), being interviewed by media.
 |
| What big feet you have Tickles Tabitha. |
As they grew up they educated me on the technicalities of my
first website, and later social media.
They did everything from dressing up as the Tickles Tabitha character to
critiquing my presentations.
It was only this year that Jordan realized, what he viewed as
ordinary and often embarrassing, some of his college classmates thought was
totally awesome.
So maybe I gloated a little bit. It was one of those -I TOLD YOU SO- moments every Mom with a young adult child appreciates.
 |
| Clowning around at the Harris Nuclear Plant's Community Days Event. |
Teachers often ask me to share how students might come up
with a writing idea. I always advise educators and students to pay attention to
what goes on in their own lives. Sometimes
the very thing that bores or annoys them most (like having to help out with your
mother’s author events) may one day inspire an idea to write about.
When Jordan called and said, he had a writing assignment he
thought I might like, I knew better than to be flattered, but I could not have
been prouder.
Jordan, is a senior, majoring in biology at Western Carolina University.
Pink
Profits
Jordan B Frahm
I.
Introduction
This essay intends to inform the
reader of the ethical misconduct involved in the popularization of breast
cancer awareness by various organizations. It will explore the rise of breast
cancer philanthropy in the commercial setting, the effects it has had on the
outlook of the disease, and the cultural implications related to the way
awareness is marketed.
II.
Pink
Diagnosis
Prior
to the 20th century, breast cancer was treated as taboo relative to
today’s progressive openness on the subject. Although feminist movements can
largely be credited for paving the way for breast cancer awareness campaigns,
the disease’s most recognizable symbol of awareness was first used in 1992 as
an object of Self magazine’s second
annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month issue. Fernandez recounts the story of the
pink ribbon’s beginnings in Mamm Magazine:
A woman named Charlotte Haley had been distributing peach-colored ribbons with
a card that read: "The National Cancer Institute annual budget is $1.8
billion, only 5 percent goes for cancer prevention. Help us wake up our
legislators and America by wearing this ribbon.” Self magazine contacted Haley to harness the ribbons for national
awareness, but the activist declined in favor of a less commercial approach.
However, Self legally circumvented
Haley’s apprehension by using pink ribbons instead. That year, Estée Lauder
handed out 1.5 million pink ribbons accompanied by breast self-exam instructions.
(Fernandez)
Avon and other cosmetic names
followed suit with wild success in the coming years, bringing pink ribbons and
breast cancer closer into the public eye. According to Fernandez, “Between 1991
and 1996, federal funding for breast cancer research increased nearly fourfold
to over $550 million. And according to the American Cancer Society, the
percentage of women getting annual mammograms and clinical breast exams has
more than doubled over the last decade [as of 1998].” In addition to the pink
ribbon, a variety of other breast cancer awareness campaigns have aided in
spotlighting the once-overlooked disease. Awareness has even transcended the
commercial market, reaching the levels of diplomatic implementation. In 2006,
the U.S.-Middle East Partnership for Breast Cancer Awareness was created, and
soon made partnership with “the Komen Foundation, the Avon Corporation, M. D.
Anderson Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins University, and a variety of cancer care
and business organizations in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Jordan, Morocco, and Palestine.” (King 287).
III.
Philanthropy
Prognosis
Superficially,
this campaign to end breast cancer appears wildly successful. According to
Breastcancer.org, “Breast cancer incidence rates in the U.S. began decreasing
in the year 2000, after increasing for the previous two decades.” Yet conflicts
of interest lie just below the surface and one must consider whether this
campaigning has created a long-term solution to our breast cancer problem. Eli
Lilly is a pharmaceutical company that sells cancer treatments (Gemzar) and
preventatives (Evista) yet also markets rBGH – the artificial growth hormone it
acquired from Monsanto to produce more milk in cows, despite its link to
elevated risk of breast cancer (Hankinson et al, Macaulay, Resnicoff &
Baserga). This suggests that Eli Lilly profits from both the treatment and the
causal factors of breast cancer. The cosmetic industry, as well, notoriously
uses cancer-linked ingredients in their products, yet once was the sole
distributor of pink-ribbon merchandise. And despite the fact these companies
raise awareness, it is clear that it is a profit-driven system. From a
perspective of Virtue-based ethics, these organizations fail to do good in that
they have acted for the wrong reason.
Commercial organizations
recognize that consumers will respond to the opportunity to join a cause,
because there is social influence to be philanthropic. According to Bolnick,
there are “social pressures to contribute to the charity, and [consumers] will
base their decisions upon the strength of these pressures, the utility derived
from giving to the particular project, and the cost of choosing to contribute”
(220). The pink-ribbon campaign has produced a huge variety of everyday items
with pink labels, removing the variable of derived utility. That is, the
consumer is going to buy a given product anyway, so there is only the choice
between the regular brand and the one that supports breast cancer awareness.
Oftentimes they are the same or similar price, removing Bolnick’s variable of
the cost of choosing to contribute. Ultimately, shoppers shift their purchasing
decisions toward pink labels and feel charitable with little effort involved on
their part. Even the U.S.-Middle East Partnership for Breast Cancer Awareness
is suspect. Consider that “the campaign is a subproject of the Middle East
Partnership Initiative (MEPI), launched on December 12, 2002 by then-Secretary
of State Colin Powell in the run-up to
the invasion of Iraq” (bold added), and that even though the program is
“encouraging companies to launch awareness programs and to offer free screening
to employees, … Dubai already had in place a comprehensive free mammography
service… open to foreigners as well as locals with no identification or health
care required” (King, 288). Still, breast cancer screenings themselves are a
matter of debate as there are many risks involved. Neither the money
contributed towards breast cancer awareness, nor treatment, nor screenings can
be judged as directly supportive to actually preventing or curing the disease
itself. In a Utilitarian sense, then, good has not been done because, in the
long term, breast cancer has only been applied a bandage.
IV.
Social
Side-Effects
As breast cancer awareness campaigns
became washed in pink, it seemed that so too did the disease’s afflicted. Amy
Langer, executive director of the National Alliance of Breast Cancer
Organizations is quoted as saying, “it’s about body image, it’s about
nurturing—it’s certainly about femininity,” (Fernandez). Initially it may
seem fitting that breast cancer awareness campaigns be modeled after the
concept of femininity, but this has had profound cultural consequences. The
face of the fight against breast cancer has essentially become the young,
white, attractive woman. Misleading advertisements for the risk of breast
cancer in America may visually depict young women, while the actual data being
presented is representative of those in their sixties and above. Mohanty
comments on the “assumption that all women, across classes and cultures, are
somehow socially constituted as a homogeneous group identified prior to the
process of analysis,” raising the notion that this homogeneity is “produced not
on the basis of biological essentials but rather on the basis of secondary
sociological and anthropological universals” (22). By overlooking these
biological essentials, the mainstream concern for breast cancer has largely
overlooked the male population affected by the disease. For a diagnosed man, the
feminized picture of the breast cancer struggle can be alienating despite how
far our awareness has come. Women, too, are at risk when the disease is
feminized. The emphasis placed on the sexuality of breasts has both garnered
attention and given female patients a paradox - as described by Schulzke –
because “once one has suffered from this paradigmatic woman’s disease, one
loses the socially valued signs of femininity” (39). Schulzke even raises the
concern that “The prevalence of pink indicates the lost radicalism and return
to a traditional conception of women and actually helps to prevent them from
taking meaningful action” (50). Pink propaganda seems an effective means to
distract women from the profitable cycle of cancer described in Section III via
the feeling of comradery - or even sisterhood. On all accounts, the young,
attractive, female archetype for breast cancer is only valid in media, not in
the true demographics of the disease. Here again, Utilitarian ethics dictates
that good has not necessarily been done: the social pressures derived from
feminizing breast cancer must be weighed against the awareness raised – which
has not necessarily helped to cure the disease.
V.
Conclusion
Marketing methods have been used to
lift breast cancer into the public eye, providing awareness of its prevalence
and methods of detection to the masses. Yet it is simultaneously clear that the
concept of breast cancer activism has been used with conflicting interest, as
even the companies that have so stridently brought attention to the disease are
responsible for causing it in the first place. Meanwhile, these groups profit
from marketing schemes colored pink and the mainstream media have consequently
distributed a skewed vision of what it means to have breast cancer.
REFERENCES
Bolnick, Bruce. “Toward a
Behavioral Theory of Philanthropic Activity.” Altruism, Morality, and Economic Theory. Russell Sage Foundation,
1975. Print.
Fernandez, Sandy M. “Pretty in
Pink.” Mamm, June/July 1998;
available at http://thinkbeforeyoupink.org/?page_id=26. Accessed Mar 31, 2014.
Hankinson
S, et al. Circulating concentrations of insulin-like growth factor 1 and risk
of breast cancer. Lancet 351:1393-1396, 1998.
King, Samantha. “Pink Diplomacy:
On the Uses and Abuses of Breast Cancer Awareness.” Health Communication 25.3 (2010): 286-289.
Macaulay
VM. Insulin-like growth factors and cancer. British Journal of Cancer
65:311-320, 1998.
Mohanty, Chandra. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing
Theory, Practicing Solidarity. New York: Duke UP, 2003. Print.
Resnicoff
M, Baserga R. The insulin-like growth factor 1 receptor protects tumor cells
from apoptosis in vivo. Cancer Research 55:2463-69, 1998.
Schulzke, Marcus. “Hidden Bodies
& the Representation of Breast Cancer.” Women's
Health and Urban Life 10.2 (2011): 37-55.
U.S. Breast Cancer Statistics. Breastcancer.org. Sept 26, 2013.
Accessed Apr 10, 2014.
