Feminist Current

October was breast cancer awareness month, a month when everything turns pink. But do these ‘pink’ campaigns actually work? In terms of ending the breast cancer epidemic is awareness productive? What does all this pinkwashing actually work towards? Will buying ‘pink’ products contribute towards prevention or towards finding a cure? I interviewed Kim Irish of [...]

Well this is it. The end is upon us. By now you’re probably near-bald from tearing your hair out over the effed-upedness that we are subjected to every time Breast Cancer Awareness Month rolls around. Suddenly we’re inundated with pink crap as every company around tries to glom on to the breast cancer epidemic in [...]

This is just the worst. Along the lines of campaigns (if they could even be called campaigns, seem more like marketing schemes) like Boobies Rule and I Love Boobies, which promote the idea that we should only care about breast cancer because breasts are sexualized body parts, a campaign to ‘raise awareness’ about cervical cancer [...]

YAY! Ladies dressed up as Playboy bunnies stopping cancer with sexxxxxiness!     Ugh. But seriously. Do we have to go over this every year? I don’t know that people who have cancer feel like it’s super sexy, but whatever! Those people are party poopers. Cancer = boring amiright?

In case the title was unclear, this post will be brief and ragey. There are a myriad of reasons why “awareness” campaigns are flawed. But it is breast cancer “awareness” campaigns that seem to have perfected the act of combining flawed with offensive. It isn’t only that these campaigns have “lost focus” or that many [...]