“Why are the comics pink?” my mother wanted to know a few weeks ago, glancing at the Sunday funnies lying on the kitchen table. “Breast cancer,” I explained.
Enough said. Anyone who hasn’t been living on Neptune for the past few years knows that pink is shorthand for, “I care about breast cancer patients.” Especially during last month, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the whole world seemed awash in pink. From football players’ chinstraps to bracelets to the omnipresent ribbons to, yes, the comics, the color of awareness was everywhere.
It’s odd, then, that some breast cancer patients and survivors—like my mom—are getting a little tired of it all.
“Especially during October, everything from toilet paper to buckets of fried chicken to the chin straps of NFL players look as if they have been steeped in Pepto,” writes Peggy Orenstein, another survivor, in The New York Times. “If the goal was ‘awareness,’ that has surely been met—largely, you could argue, because corporations recognized that with virtually no effort (and often minimal monetary contribution), going pink made them a lot of green.”
What does all this awareness actually accomplish? In Orenstein’s opinion, not much: “Rather than being playful, which is what these campaigns are after, sexy cancer suppresses discussion of real cancer, rendering its sufferers—the ones whom all this is supposed to be for—invisible.”
My mom feels much the same way, which is why the pink comics left her less than impressed. When she had her own battle with breast cancer a few years ago, the parade of pink was little more than background noise for her, and not very pleasant noise at that. For all the efforts to correlate cute pink accessories with the message “I care,” none of those things made her feel cared for at all. It was the turning of a disease into a trend—something that’s been done with every disease from AIDS to Alzheimer’s to acid reflux. And in the long run, it felt more dehumanizing than encouraging.
It’s true that sometimes the sale of pink stuff is used to raise money for research. But then again, some aspects of the awareness campaigns are worse than useless. Remember the Facebook fiasco last year when women were supposed to post their bra colors as their status to “raise awareness of breast cancer”? Right. The only awareness that was raised had exceedingly little to do with cancer. And that’s not even the worst example of what Orenstein calls “the sexualization of breast cancer.” I’ve even seen “Save the Ta-Tas” onesies for infants, which opens up a whole other can of worms.
I’m not condemning the motives of well-intentioned people who are trying to show their support through awareness campaigns. But it’s a little over the top. (Does anyone really think that Mary Worth or Marvin looked good with pink hair?) More and more, I’m hearing people complain about pink fatigue and start to wonder just how helpful these campaigns actually are.
So forget the pink for a minute. Forget the showy gestures and the endless raising of awareness that’s already been raised as high as it can go. How can you go the extra mile to make a cancer patient feel genuinely cared for?
Maybe it’s not as easy as wearing pink, but you might be surprised by how easy it can be. My mom remembers gestures that meant the world to her at the hospital where she was treated. One group of volunteers provided a beribboned basket (“and it wasn’t a pink ribbon,” she specifies) of free cookies and juice for patients as they came out of dehydrating radiation treatments. Other people left gospel tracts and brochures for support groups. A hospital volunteer in a multicolored clown wig cheered up patients in the waiting room, and brought them heated blankets in the exam room. Those efforts made her feel really cared for.
Mom also met some fellow patients who had come for their treatments in cabs because no one was there to bring them or take them home afterward. One of the most caring things anyone can do for a patient, she suggests, is to volunteer to take her to and from her appointments.
There’s so much that breast cancer patients need, and ribbons and bracelets don’t begin to scratch the surface. If you want to wear pink, wear it because you like it or it looks good on you. But if you want to make a breast cancer patient feel better, how about making a genuine offer of help?
Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint Online and Dickensblog. She wrote “The Good Christian Girl: A Fable” and “God Loves a Good Romance” for CT online, and “Why Sex Ruins TV Romances” for Her.meneutics
