domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

There’s a meme going around on Facebook. I got the following email several times yesterday.

Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men …. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status… Haha

I won’t lie—it pissed me off. I fired off a fast response, but struggled to keep it within Facebook’s 420 character limit.

1st, I don’t wear bras. 2nd, I don’t see how posting the color of your bra is in any way promoting cancer awareness. 3rd, the message sent is indicative of larger issues w/the way society treats breast cancer—people who get it are “girls”— immature women—who have to save their boobies for men, who are adult males. It’s… creepy, misogynistic, & infantilizing. Let’s try fighting breast cancer without objectifying women.

I’ve touched on this before, but what the hell—it says humorless feminist shrew up there for a reason.

Here’s the thing about the Facebook meme: it has nothing—zip, zero, zilch—to do with breast cancer. At the very most, it’s going to eventually make people think about breasts, though so far, it seems that people think it’s about underpants. But let’s face it: the end result is pretty much “Think about me in my underwear!”

Yup. Cancer hates underwear.

Oh, wait. Cancer doesn’t give a fuck. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re wearing a super-cute pink-and-black polka-dot bra with matching boy-cut shorts or if you’re wearing boxers and a singlet. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re wearing a “Save the TaTas” shirt, or if you have a bumper sticker with one of the many desperate attempts to avoid using the word breasts. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re cute and perky and swathed in pink, the magical color of cancer-repellent.

Of course it’s pink. We’re talking about girls! Girls get breast cancer, and girls love pink. My general experience is that women—that is, grown-up girls—do not really get all that upset if their sneakers, Kitchen-Aids, hand sanitizer, and pizza boxes (yes, a local place actually got pink boxes to support breast cancer) are not pink and sparkly. That’s generally reserved for children, not grown women. The exception is, of course, if you have cancer.

Pinkwashing helps make cancer feel safer, more normative. You’re not fighting a disease, you’re joining a sisterhood. Moreover, it makes “breast cancer activism” the easiest form of armchair activism. Are you wearing a pink teeshirt? You’re fighting breast cancer! Did you buy the special pink ribbon macaroni and cheese at the supermarket? You’re totally fighting breast cancer. You bought a pizza, and it came in a pink box? You are the most awesome activist ever.

And don’t get me wrong—I’d like to make having cancer as safe and non-lethal as possible. But painting it all pink and calling it activism isn’t fixing anything.

There are some awesome commercials promoting breast cancer awareness, though! Like this one:

Because men love boobs! Then, just for fun, the ad will ignore the fact that some men—fat men, trans men, men with gynecomastia—have breasts, too. It’ll also ignore that men—regardless of the size of their chest—can and do get breast cancer. Finally, we’ll remind you yet again that men know more about how to take care of a woman’s body than any woman could, and women have a responsibility to take care of their breasts, because men want to look at them.

Or, as pointed out on Shakesville, there’s this ad:

It’s definitely not about objectification at all! Only it is, and it’s shitty. It’s even shittier because this is allegedly about helping women, but the advertisements are dehumanizing and objectifying. Women! Pay attention to your breasts, because they’re the only part of you that we care about.

I’m not sure what this sort of “awareness” is meant to achieve. The only thing that I’m taking away from the ads above is that hey, men really like breasts, so women should make sure that their breasts are healthy, perky, and available to the male gaze at all times. Oh, and maybe if you could also wear a wet white teeshirt, that’d be great.

What the ribbons and tee-shirts and pizza boxes miss is that really, we’re not trying to save boobies or gazongas. We’re trying to save lives. Because cancer kills people. I’ve got breast cancer in my family, and I’ll tell you right here and now, I don’t give a shit if my aunt, sister, friend, co-worker doesn’t have breasts anymore. I care a whole fucking lot if she dies.