Health

I grew up with the pink ribbons and the races. One of my earliest memories involves going to Race for the Cure and checking out vendor booths. Mimicking my older relatives, I took a turn squeezing what years later I realized was a prosthetic breast, to be placed in a bra after a mastectomy.

Komen ingrained themselves deeply into the breast cancer world. They are synonymous with the pink ribbon and breast cancer itself. They surely realized that when a loved one is affected, you will do anything if you think it will help stop their pain. And when it just wasn’t meant to be, you will do anything to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. All they needed to do was create a community, make it uplifting and valuable to participants, sell them pink trinkets… and profit.

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If you left your house during last month, you likely saw products emblazoned with pink ribbons grace the shelves of grocery and retail outlets. You turned on the TV and saw NFL teams playing in pink shoes and socks. October has been designated “breast cancer awareness month,” but selling pink merchandise under the guise of awareness amounts to little else than being a subtle way of using sex to sell and to get money from well-meaning consumers.

One day in early October, I walked through the Mall of America and was barraged by pink. It was impossible to escape. Nearly every store was selling something specifically for breast cancer awareness. Later that same day, I stopped at a Walgreens location and discovered that there was even a pink Snuggie.

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