Detailing the problems of ‘breast cancer culture’

Title: Detailing the problems of ‘breast cancer culture’

Author: Anna Holmes

Publication: The Washington Post

Publication Date: February 09, 2012

…Although the mainstreaming of breast cancer activism and awareness is a triumph of marketing and outreach, its ubiquity has come at a cost – or depending on your point of a view, a profit – in the form of hundreds if not thousands of new or retooled consumer products. Cars, makeup, vacuum cleaners, stuffed animals, NFL and MLB apparel . . . all these and more have, at one point or another over the past few decades, been slapped with a fresh coat of (pink) paint and the imprimatur of any number of breast cancer charities, including Komen and the other behemoth in the breast cancer space, the Avon Foundation…

pink ribbons, pink ribboned-consumer goods and associated runs, walks and jumps “for the cure” have become so commonplace and therefore benign that we hardly notice them; we’re anesthetized to this major killer of women to the point that it’s almost accepted as a rite of passage, not a profoundly painful experience. The color has been promoted as fashionable, a shorthand for a sort of optimism and positivity – what [Samantha] King calls the “tyranny of cheerfulness” – that threatens to obscure much of the justifiable grief, frustration and fear that accompany the epidemic, not to mention the hypocrisies of the companies who benefit from it…

Link to Full Article

Defunding Planned Parenthood: Did you know it serves men, too?

Title: Defunding Planned Parenthood: Did you know it serves men, too?

Author: Karen Heller

Publication: The Philadelphia Inquirer

Publication Date: February 08, 2012

…The Susan G. Komen for the Cure vice president involved in yanking Planned Parenthood funding for breast exams resigned Tuesday after a punishing backlash for the breast-cancer behemoth and a boon to the nation’s leading provider of sexual and reproductive health care….

Planned Parenthood performs 770,000 Pap smears annually, and more than four million tests for STDs (for men, too!). Three of four clients visit clinics for services to prevent unintended pregnancies, which helps reduce the need for abortion…

Women’s bodies are battlefields, but we never seem to argue about men.

Link to Full Article