Reel Movie Mondays Red Deer Independent Film Series

‘Pinkwashing’ and the dark side of breast-cancer philanthropy

Reel Movie Mondays screens PINK RIBBONS, INC. April 16 @ 7pm Galaxy Theatre Red Deer

liam lacey From Friday's Globe and Mail Published Friday, Feb. 03, 2012

Near the end of the polemical new National Film Board documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc., activist Judy Brady is asked what she thinks of when she sees the pink ribbon symbolizing breast-cancer awareness: “I see evil,” says Brady.

Who could possibly see anything wrong in a symbol that has mobilized people to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for breast-cancer research since the 1980s?

The answer is provided in this documentary by Quebec’s Léa Pool (Emporte-Moi, Lost and Delirious). The film is based on a 2007 book by Queen’s University professor Samantha King (Pink Ribbons Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy, one of a handful of studies in the past dozen years on the contentious social history of breast cancer and the gulf between the reality of the disease and the high-profile public perception of it.

In spite of the optimistic messages, breast cancer is not being beaten. According to the film, in 1940, a woman had a one-in-22 chance of developing the disease, while today that figure is one in eight (based on the assumption that, if all women lived to be 85, one in eight would develop it during her lifetime). And, in any case, the high profile of breast-cancer fundraising has less to do with its risk (cardiac disease and lung cancer kill more women) than its marketability.

As Barbara Brenner of the activist group Breast Cancer Action puts it, breast cancer is the “the poster child of cause marketing” because of its links to motherhood and women’s sexuality. With women doing most household buying, they’re a ready market for products that piggyback on the breast-cancer cause.

Brenner is one of a line of well-informed and impassioned women academics and activists who raise their objection to the “tyranny of cheerfulness,” demonstrated by scenes of pink-clad women walking and running for cancer fundraisers.