Movie: Pink Ribbons, Inc.

I highly recommend watching the movie Pink Ribbons, Inc. It's available via Netflix streaming. It's also available online here and here and here.

Last year, I saw down with two of my "breastie" sisters (BC survivors) to watch this documentary. Our viewing resulted in a lively conversation afterwards between the three of us. I took a bunch of notes, intending on writing them all up in to a blog post. But frankly, that was nearly a year ago and I don't want to take time to type things out that you can watch for yourself.

Please consider watching this documentary. It addresses the "pinkwashing" of breast cancer, the "pretty, feminine, and normal" portrayal of breast cancer (none of which BC actually is), and many of the ridiculous ways of turning this disease into a bottom-line fundraising event for way too many companies. Some of which are in direct conflict with ever finding a cure! Cancer-causing cosmetics? Slap a pink ribbon on it, donate a teensy amount to BC awareness or research, and sell a lot more product. It sickens me.

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Here are my notes, in case you want to get a high-level peek into what this documentary includes:

• A Huffington Post article about Komen's bad decisions...one after the other. 

• BC has become a "culture" of pink ribbons.

• 1981 - President Reagan changed things so BC funding/research needed to seek private solutions ...which lead to BC marketing. To get marketing to work, they need attention of companies. If companies associate with a cause, more people will buy their products - it worked! BC marketing promotions range from household goods to handguns to gasoline to porn sites!

• In 1940, chances of getting cancer were 1 in 22.
  In 2011, it was 1 in 8.
  Today, changes of getting breast cancer are 1 in 4. 

• Lighting monuments pink for "awareness" - accomplishes what, exactly?

• During breast cancer awareness month, the message being sent out is "be vigilant - mammograms can save lives" - But what does this really do to effect change?

• Early detection (is your best "protection") works for some...and some get sick from treatment...and for others with aggressive current treatments that can't it can't help at all. Everyone thinks they're in the first group (that early detection will save you), but that only works for some!

• Learning to live versus learning to die.

• We are not just a little pink ribbon! We have faces, pain, and stories.

• Some survivors have anger with pride and optimism expressed by marketing tactics and companies have to "sell the disease" in a certain way or lose customers.

• Yoplait "Save Lids to Save Lives" example: For every lid you save from a Yoplait yogurt (and mail in, using a stamp that costs you money), they will donate 10 cents to breast cancer research. If you ate 3 yogurts/day for 4 months, you will have raised a grand total of $36 for breast cancer research, but spent more on stamps and in environmental shipping waste. Really? - Just write a check!

• NFL: players were in trouble with the law, needed help with boosting positive image of individuals and teams, and they realized there's a large women viewership. So they started in on PINKing everything! Shoes, sweat bands, ...

• To those that call surviving "fighting a battle." We're not fighting a battle. We force ourselves to comply with the treatments recommended. 

• We shouldn't deny what is possible - good AND bad. To do so offends our sense of DIGNITY.

• Pressure on BC patients to be happy, overly optomistic, etc. : "the tyrrany of cheerfulness" - coined by Barbara Ehrenreich.

• Make it pretty, feminine, and normal = it sells. BUT BREAST CANCER IS NOT pretty, feminine, and normal!! It's time to re-politicize it: find out where your money goes! Most monies go to researching a marketable product (that extends life). Not to finding out what causes it.

• We hear how much companies raise, but not how it was spent or the results from it. How can you cure something when you don't know the cause?

• What "eggs on cancer"? It is not a foreign entity (e.g., from space, alien, "Osama") - it's at home (e.g., your body, familiar, "McVeigh").

• Every 23 seconds an individual is diagnosed with breast cancer.
  Every 69 seconds an individual dies because of breast cancer.

• Casting a pink veil of positivity over a dark and dreadful disease, we are told, encourages the myth of progress and distracts from treatment options that remain limited to what Dr. Susan Love calls “slash, burn, and poison” and mortality rates that have barely altered in six decades.

• Federal standards do not protect public health.

• Charlotte Haley is the original ribbon maker. Hers was salmon colored. Estee Lauder wanted to use it to market. Haley wanted nothing to do with Estee Lauder; they were too commercial. On goes the story with lawyers, changing the color, etc. Estee Lauder conducted focus groups on what color was "comforting, reassuring, and non-threatening" (everything BC is not) - which led to the ribbon color being pink.

• "We used to march in the streets. Now we run for a cure."

• Get the stuff out of the products we use everyday.

• Another Yoplait example: send in lids from dairy stimulated with RGBH - linked with breast cancer! Activists called them on it and they changed their formula - no longer use RGBH.

• AstraZeneca: the maker of Tamoxifen and Arimidex (biopharmaceudicals used in BC treatment) - also makes chemicals that are estrogen-boosters! Check it out here or read a quote from the article below:

"Some of the very companies that sponsor fundraising events and make money off of pink revenue either make deleterious products linked to cancer or stand to profit from treatment of it. Revlon, sponsors of the Run/Walk for Women, are manufacturers of many cosmetics (searchable on the database Skin Deep) that are linked to cancer. The average woman puts on 12 cosmetics products per day, yet only 20% of all cosmetics have undergone FDA examination and safety testing. The pharmaceutical giant Astra Zeneca can’t seem to decide if it’s for or against cancer. They produce the anti-estrogen breast cancer drug Tamoxifen, yet also manufacture the pesticide atrazine (under the Swiss-based company Syngenta), which has been linked to cancer as an estrogen-boosting compound. Breast cancer history month (October) is nothing more than a PR stunt that was invented by a marketing expert at… drumroll please… Astra Zeneca! Their goal was to promote mammography as a powerful weapon in the war against breast cancer. But as the American arm of the largest chemical company in the world, the reality is that Astra Zeneca was and is benefiting from the very illness it was urging women to get screened for. Perhaps the most audacious example of them all is pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Sponsors of cancer research and treatment, both in medicine and the community, Lilly produced the cancer and infertility causing DES (diethylstilbestrol), and currently manufactures rBGH, an artificial hormone given to cows to make them produce more milk. rBGH has been linked to breast cancer and a host of other health problems. These strong corporate links in many ways explain the uplifting, happy, sterile messaging behind the pink ribbon. Corporations are, quite bluntly, making money off of marketing cancer, so if they don’t put a smiley face on the disease, they will alienate their customers and the conglomerate businesses pouring money into these campaigns."

• October: BCA month (breast cancer awareness): a comforting lie.
  mammography-->radiation exposure-->BC risk increase

• Research = incremental increase in life expectancy. That is not enough.

• Walk and run-a-thons are like a revival.

• Do something besides worry. Act!