I’ll tell you the truth : I love October, but I hate breast cancer awareness month.
Please hear me out, because I’m the daughter of a breast cancer survivor.
To make a very long and painful story extremely short, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer 13 years ago. She had a mastectomy, chemo, and went into remission. Five years later, she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer – breast cancer that had moved to other parts of her body. First, it was a tumor that had wrapped itself around one of her lower vertebrae. Then, it was her femur, her humerus, her ribs. She had radiation treatments. She found a cancer treatment center to go to where the doctors could give her more holistic treatment options. She started taking vitamins and eating better and pursuing clinical trial treatments that might help her. In 2008, we found out that it spread to her liver. She still kept moving forward, finding more ways to treat her illness. Her list of treatments and counter-treatments is a million miles long.
Eight years after her second diagnosis, here she is. And here I am. We’ve learned a lot about what’s important to us, and we’ve learned that we are blessed beyond our wildest understandings. But that’s not to say that the heartache of living with cancer isn’t abundantly, painfully real to us.
We pray that someone finds a cure to this disease. We pray that others find the strength and the faith to battle their own diagnoses and that they can learn to advocate for themselves. We pray that people learn to pay attention to their own bodies, their own health histories, their own well-being.
However, I just cannot stomach the pink-ribboned, horrifically over-sexualized, over-commercialized breast cancer “awareness” campaigns that have come out in recent years. Whether it’s buying a bag of chips with a pink ribbon on it, sporting a “Feel Your Boobies” t-shirt, or posting a vague and suspiciously sexual statement in a Facebook status, it has all become an easy target for manufacturers and commercial advertisers to target their most vulnerable and influential demographic: women.
Should we be donating to a good cause and raising awareness? Yes. But at what cost?
Even the products that sport the pink ribbon have been known to contain harmful cancer-causing chemicals. And there are other campaigns meant to “raise awareness” that raise questions about their moral and ethical treatment of women.
So the question becomes: are these companies milking the breast cancer issue and are you willing to continue buying into their exploitation?
Because here’s the thing: raising awareness and finding a cure breast cancer is a good cause. But not all campaigns “for a good cause” are good for us.