I hate pink ribbons. They make me angry. They’re f-ing EVERYWHERE. At a traffic light yesterday, three out of five cars were sporting the magnetic pink ribbon. At work, people wear pink ribbon bracelets and write on pink ribbon post-it notes. The woman I sat beside at a wedding this Saturday had a damn pink ribbon tattooed on her leg. There are pink ribbons on tubs of margarine, on t-shirts, on Visa cards.
I initially felt guilty about my aversion to pink ribbons. After all, there’s one carved into my mother’s headstone, and pink was the color of choice at Mama’s funeral at the family’s request. I attacked the use of the pink ribbon as a marketing gimmick; used the piddly-ass percentage of proceeds that actually goes to breast cancer research as justification for the irrational fury that flairs every time I see a flash of “breast cancer pink,” as the color is now commonly called.
But it’s gone beyond nailing the breast cancer orgs for their measly contributions, or calculating exactly how little of those research dollars actually trickle down to triple-negative research to help women like my mom. The pink ribbon has become a fashion statement. It’s trendy, it’s cool, it’s a fad, and it pisses me right the hell off.
Please don’t misunderstand. My mom wore her pink ribbon with pride. She lived breast cancer, talked breast cancer, walked breast cancer. She didn’t have a choice, because she HAD breast cancer. We wore our pink “BELIEVE FOR DENISE” bracelets until the last hope had been extinguished. But there’s a fine line between truly believing, truly supporting, truly LIVING breast cancer, and being a bracelet-wearing sham. Maybe I’m cynical and jaded and angry – but I have a strong inkling that there are people who out there who have traded in their LIVESTRONG and WWJD bracelets and car magnets to jump on the breast cancer train. It’s a cheap warm fuzzy without any of the inconvenience of actually DOING something.
Wonder if anyone would appreciate the irony of a t-shirt reading “Breast cancer is not a fashion statement”?
