Barbara Ehrenreich Already Warned Us About The Komen Foundation
1. "Today, [breast cancer is] the biggest disease on the cultural map, bigger than AIDS, cystic fibrosis, or spinal injury, bigger even than those more prolific killers of women - heart disease, lung cancer, and stroke. There are roughly hundreds of websites devoted to it, not to mention newsletters, support groups, a whole genre of first-person breast-cancer books; even a glossy, upper-middle-brow, monthly magazine, Mamm. There are four major national breast-cancer organizations, of which the mightiest, in financial terms, is The Susan G. Komen Foundation, headed by breast-cancer veteran and Bush’s nominee for ambassador to Hungary Nancy Brinker. Komen organizes the annual Race For The Cure, which attracts about a million people - mostly survivors, friends, and family members. Its website provides a microcosm of the new breast-cancer culture, offering news of the races, message boards for accounts of individuals’ struggles with the disease, and a “marketplace” of breast-cancer-related products to buy.“
2. "While AIDS goes begging and low-rent diseases like tuberculosis have no friends at all, breast cancer has been able to count on Revlon, Avon, Ford, Tiffany, Pier 1, Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Lee Jeans, Saks Fifth Avenue, JC Penny, Boston Market, Wilson athletic gear - and I apologize to those I’ve omitted. You can "shop for the cure” during the week when Saks donates 2 percent of sales to a breast-cancer fund; “wear denim for the cure” during Lee National Denim Day, when for a $5 donation you get to wear blue jeans to work. You can even “invest for the cure,” in the Kinetics Assets Management’s new no-load Medical Fund, which specializes entirely in businesses involved in cancer research.“
3. "Breast cancer would hardly be the darling of corporate America if its complexion changed from pink to green. It is the very blandness of breast cancer, at least in mainstream perceptions, that makes it an attractive object of corporate charity and a way for companies to brand themselves friends of the middle-aged female market. With breast cancer, "there was no concern that you might actually turn off your audience because of the life style or sexual connotations that AIDS has,” Amy Langer, director of the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations, told the New York Times in 1996. “That gives corporations a certain freedom and a certain relief in supporting the cause.” Or as Cindy Pearson, director of the National Women’s Health Network, the organizational progeny of the Women’s Health Movement, puts it more caustically: “Breast cancer provides a way of doing something for women, without being feminist.”
4. “In the mainstream of breast-cancer culture, one finds very little anger, no mention of possible environmental causes, few complaints about the fact that, in all but the more advanced, metastasized cases, it is the "treatments,” not the disease, that cause illness and pain. The stance toward existing treatments is occasionally critical - in Mamm, for example - but more commonly grateful; the overall tone, almost universally upbeat. The Breast Friends website, for example, features a series of inspirational quotes: “Don’t Cry Over Anything That Can’t Cry Over You,” “I Can’t Stop The Birds Of Sorrow From Circling My Head, But I Can Stop Them From Building A Nest In My Hair,” “When Life Hands Out Lemons, Squeeze Out A Smile,” “Don’t wait for your ship to come in…..Swim out to meet it,” and much more of that ilk. Even in the relatively sophisticated Mamm, a columnist bemoans not cancer or chemotherapy but the end of chemotherapy, and humorously proposes to deal with her separation anxiety by pitching a tent outside her oncologist’s office. So pervasive is the perkiness of breast-cancer world that unhappiness requires a kind of apology, as when “Lucy,” whose “long term prognosis is not good,” starts her personal narrative on breastcancertalk.org by telling us that her story “is not the usual one, full of sweetness and hope, but true nevertheless.”
5. “Scared and medically weakened women can hardly be expected to transform their support groups into bands of activists and rush out into the streets, but the equanimity of breast-cancer culture goes beyond mere absence of anger to what looks, all too often, like a positive embrace of the disease. As "Mary” reports, on the Boston Buds message board: “I really believe I am a much more sensitive and thoughtful person now. It might sound funny but I was a real worrier before. Now I don’t want to waste my energy on worrying. I enjoy life so much more now and in a lot of aspects I am much happier now.” [….] Cindy Cherry, quoted in the Washington Post, goes further: “If I had to do it over, would I want breast cancer? Absolutely. I’m not the same person I was, and I’m glad I’m not.” [….] Never a complaint about lost time, shattered sexual confidence, or the long-term weakening of the arms caused by lymph-node dissection and radiation. What does not destroy you, to paraphrase Nietzsche, makes you a spunkier, more evolved, sort of person.“
6. "The effect of this relentless brightsiding is to transform breast cancer into a rite of passage - not an injustice or a tragedy to rail against, but a normal marker in the life cycle, like menopause or graying hair. Everything in mainstream breast-cancer culture serves, no doubt inadvertently, to tame and normalize the disease: the diagnosis may be disastrous, but there are those cunning pink rhinestone angel pins to buy and races to train for. Even the heavy traffic in personal narratives and practical tips, which I found so useful, bears an implicit acceptance of the disease and the current barbarous approaches to its treatment: you can get so busy comparing attractive headscarves that you forget to question a form of treatment that temporarily renders you both bald and immuno-competent.”
7. "No, this is not my sisterhood. For me at least, breast cancer will never be a source of identity or pride. As my dying correspondent Gerri wrote: “IT IS NOT OK!” What it is, along with cancer generally or any slow and painful way of dying, is an abomination, and, to the extent that it’s man-made, also a crime. This is the one great truth that I bring out of the breast-cancer experience, which did not, I can now report, make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual - only more deeply angry. What sustained me through the “treatments” is a purifying rage, a resolve, framed in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the last polluter, along with, say, the last smug health-insurance operative, strangled with the last pink ribbon. Cancer or no cancer, I will not live that long of course. But I know this much right now for sure: I will not go into that last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm.“
- Barbara Ehrenreich, "Welcome To Cancerland: A Mammogram Leads To A Cult Of Pink Kitsch,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2011
http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/cancerland.htm
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