The pink, the pink, the pink

In the mid-90s, when I was working at George Brown College, I was also a volunteer at the AIDS Committee of Toronto, writing and copy-editing their volunteer newsletter. When the AIDS Walk for Life came around, I organized a walk team for George Brown. It was (and remains) a very important cause for me; I lost many friends and acquaintances to the disease. While I was running around the campus putting up posters and soliciting pledges, one of my coworkers, a woman who was probably 10 or more years my senior, said to me wistfully -- and possibly with a bit of resentment in her tone, in fact -- "You know, many more people die of breast cancer every year than die of AIDS, yet the AIDS cause has all this media coverage and and all these fundraisers. I wish people would pay as much attention to the fight against breast cancer."

I nodded, not knowing what to say. I probably wondered if her comment was a bit homophobic. I knew she had survived breast cancer, but at the time, that disease was very distant from my radar screen. Almost nobody in my fairly large family had ever had cancer of any kind; I was in my mid-30s and planning, as people in their mid-30s do, to live forever, and, moreover, to be healthy forever. Breast cancer was something that happened to a handful of other women, not to me.

Fast-forward a little over a decade. I am now a two-year breast cancer survivor (and I'm happy to say my former colleague is still with us, as well). And you cannot walk a block in my city, or watch TV for more than an hour, or surf the Internet, without running into the ubiquitous pink ribbon. Breast cancer is the cause du jour, and it seems to know no bounds. The other day I saw a billboard for a brand of chewing gum that featured the familiar ribbon loop carved into a piece of pink gum. Professional sports players wore pink jerseys during games to raise breast cancer awareness. Not long ago the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation sent me a survey that involved evaluating different stylized pink-ribbon logos, and asked me to be part of a focus group. Breast cancer has to be one of the most successful brands ever invented.

Of course, I'm grateful. But leaving aside the argument that too much effort and money is spent by the breast cancer charity machine on a cure and not enough on prevention, I'm also a little embarrassed by the saturation of the marketplace by the ailment that, I admit, may kill me yet. I know there are people who, like my former colleague, must look wistfully and resentfully at the pink juggernaut and wonder why their disease -- whether it be colitis or ALS or prostate cancer -- doesn't get the same attention. I think of Cheryl Hawkes, the widow of journalist Bill Cameron, who died of esophageal cancer. She is trying to leverage Bill's fame to bring a little attention to that disease, which she says is on the rise (and which claimed my dad's youngest brother this year), but has found there's very little infrastructure in place for fundraising and awareness.

Women's ailments were ignored for years, it's true. I admire the women and men who mobilized so much clout for the breast cancer cause -- the squeaky wheel, and all that. If you want help, you have to go out and find a way to get it -- you can't wait for the government to find the money to cure everything. And it's typical of marketing that some causes get more time in the sun than others. The public has only so much attention span, and we can't focus on everything at once. But the situation is hardly equitable. The breast cancer bandwagon, like the AIDS bandwagon, smacks more than a little of political correctness and fashion now. Thus does the pendulum swing.

UPDATE: A former student of mine sends a link to www.thinkbeforeyoupink.org, a little cartoon from the anti-establishment Breast Cancer Action group that criticizes companies' use of the breast cancer cause to sell more stuff.