Pink ribbon blues

Over the past decades, public perception about cancer has changed from a barely talked about phenomenon to a media craze. The results of cancer awareness have been numerous and it is only now that these results are being studied in a critical manner. This paper shall focus on one of the books, Pink Ribbon Blues, which seeks to examine the latest media and public craze in relation to cancer awareness, the pink ribbon and other pink products. In the book, the author who is a respected American sociologist asserts that public discourse and media hype about breast cancer actually undermines, not promotes, women’s health.

The rise of the pink ribbon, although not attributable to one founder, grew out of the 1970s health movement targeting women and the 1980s and 1990s breast cancer movement, with the rise of the pink ribbon gaining currency in the 1990s. Sulik states that the pink ribbon culture can be thought of as an independent cultural system that, like any culture, has its own norms, beliefs, practices, habits, values and symbols (Sulik 11). The ideas of the pink ribbon culture are spread via mass media, educational and awareness campaigns, support groups, community event and other avenues that direct public discourse. Since the pink ribbon movement considers everyone who thinks, buys and displays pink as being a hero/heroine who fights breast cancer, it has become increasingly popular both with the media and the public. This is what Sulik terms as user friendliness of the pink ribbon.

One of the effects of the pink ribbon movement has been the transformation of cancer patients and survivors from victims to heroes. As a matter of fact, Sulik dedicates a lot of her time in analyzing the pink warrior figure especially in relation to the SHEro pattern. While it does serve to make the single patient feel better, it ultimately adversely affects more women than it helps cure.

Sulik attributes this to the fact that the pink ribbon places contradicting demands on women dealing with cancer. It is expected that the women celebrate their surviving with cancer while at the same time they are not supposed to any of the negative feelings that come with the illness. This has been referred to by an author of a book on the pink ribbon and a Queen’s University’s associate professor, Peggy Orenstein, as whitewashing of the disease (King 32). She asserts that while the movement does increase the awareness of the disease, the devastating effects and challenges faced by women suffering from cancer is swept under the rug.

Sulik asserts that the pink ribbon only places the women suffering from cancer and women’s health issues in general at the centre of the culture for appearances sake alone. As a matter of fact, she maintains that the pink ribbon culture has only one goal and that is changing breast cancer into a brand and increasing the brand’s recognition. This leads to the most striking idea put forward by the author, namely that the pink ribbon culture has resulted in over-awareness, ultimately leading to overtreatment of cancer cases.

The pink ribbon movement not only scares women into taking unnecessary treatments but also leads to loss of resources in the overtreatment of cancer. As Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center’s director Laura Esserman puts it, treating DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ, also known as stage zero cancer), which is a risk factor with only 5% chances of metastasizing, is like recommending surgery for someone with high cholesterol.

It also provides a ripe ground for misinformation since different stakeholders in the pink ribbon movement have different goals and priorities, often at the expense of the disease itself and the women suffering from it, leading to the rise of vanity metrics that look good on paper and charts but are misleading. An example is instead of talking about success as it relates to treatment of the disease itself such as increasing efficiency of treatment, one focuses on the pink ribbon culture’s success. Another example is a Komen foundation ad that early detection of cancer increases survival rate by 98% while if it’s not, the survival rate drops by 23%. This has been described by author Steven Woloshin as deceptive. The fact of the matter is that mammograms do find many cancers that are survivable and making women undergo mammography every year actually increases the risk of one contracting cancer due to overexposure to radiation.

Ultimately, the rise of medical consumerism benefits none of those suffering from cancer while benefiting various stakeholders in the red ribbon culture such as cancer foundations and corporations that support the foundations. Most of the money raised in relation to the disease, instead of being used to find medical cures and carry out medical research and development, gets spend on other issues such as raising awareness (Breast Cancer Action). As a case and point, Komen has dedicated $79 million to cancer research out of $2.2 billion raised over the last several years.
In the book Pik Ribbon Blues, Gayle Sulik critically looks at how popular culture affects women’s health. The book looks at various variables that come into play such as medical, social, political, economic and cultural factors. The book is a great example of a critical analysis of public perception on cancer and how it is formed and why some representations are more success than other in gaining public interest. This book will serve as a guide to understanding better how popular culture determines the public perception on various medical conditions.

Works Cited

Breast Cancer Action. "Think before you pink." thinkbeforeyoupink.org/. Accessed 29 Sept. 2017.
King, Samantha. Pink Ribbon Inc. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Orenstein, Peggy. Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer. 2013.
Sulik, Gayle A. Pink Ribbon Blues. 2010.