What is Awareness?

October 21st, 2010

In case you have been hiding under a rock, let me alert you to the fact that October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. It’s actually become a season for marketing purposes, with the pinked up products coming out late in the summer.

The campaigns have come under criticism from health care activists who point out the phenomenon of pinkwashing. By adorning their products in pink ribbons for the Cause, corporations bypass accountability for whether or not their product might actually contribute to the rise in cancer rates, or whether or not they are actually making any contribution to cancer research. Leading the way, Breast Cancer Action started the Think Before You Pink campaign, most notably leading the outcry against KFC’s Pink Buckets.

Aside from the hypocrisy behind much of the marketing, many of us are painfully aware that the body parts we have had disfigured or lost are fun to talk about, commanding disproportionate attention. It can be emotionally difficult to have your disease be the object of titillation through sexy Facebook memes, particularly when the treatment for the disease has left you feeling distinctly less sexy.

My friend Jacqui Kelly satirized this beautifully on my Facebook wall. She posted a picture of the pink ribbon Barbie with the wry caption:

Comes with prosthetic breasts, 2 wigs, chemo cap, eyebrow pencil, vomit bag, and a 5 year supply of tamoxifen…..

The dissonance between the sorority feeling of Pink Ribbon culture and the horror of treatment cannot be overstated. Nor can the uncomfortably disproportionate attention to breast cancer over other diseases that are more common or more deadly. Lung cancer and heart disease kill more women than breast cancer but do not get nearly the same attention.

I’ve tried joking about it here on my blog and on Twitter. The funny thing about my ironic testicular cancer awareness tweet (below) was that a friend who had testicular cancer was so grateful to see some equal time for his cancer, he posted it as his status update on Facebook.

The responses were revealing. Unlike a lot of the thumbs ups for the boobie meme I was poking fun at, this post got more squirmy reactions. (“I’ll never be able to look at an asterisk the same way again…”)

What does this awareness campaign get us? One the one hand, we get titillation. Less often discussed, they might invoke pain for those left behind. One of my Twitter friends lost his mother to cancer and recently felt fed up with “awareness” month. For anybody who has been there or lost somebody they loved, we can tell you, cancer is no party. It’s pain, suffering, and, sometimes, loss and lifelong grief.

So what should awareness mean? Nobody will convince me of a connection between buying pink ribbon potato chips and knowing the symptoms of breast cancer or your personal risk.

In my better world, awareness would mean that you all would know cancer risks and stop eating so much processed food. You would prioritize exercise and think about the chemicals in the products you buy. It would mean that you would know when to get screenings and schedule them in a timely way. You would know the importance of funding research for early detection and more humane and effective treatment. It would mean that instead of buying a pink Snuggie, you would donate that money to help low-income people have access to tests and treatments.

There is a lot to learn about cancer and a lot we still don’t know. Do you know about the risks involved in mammography? Do you know when you are supposed to start screening for colon cancer? Would you know the symptoms of a polyp in your colon or a melanoma on your skin? How does lymphoma or thyroid cancer usually show up? How about the signs of pancreatic cancer or liver cancer?

If we could get people to have that level of awareness, we would have accomplished a lot more than selling a bunch of stuff that people might not even need.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 21st, 2010 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Survivorship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.