So it’s October, which means it’s National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And you know what that means: pink-ribboned merchandising opportunities!
Sure, you got your mixers, and your cosmetics, and your vacuum cleaners (because nothing connects you with your womanhood like products designed to remind you that you’re a cooking, cleaning sexbot), but here’s something new: Breast Cancer Barbie!
Mattel Inc. has partnered with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation to create the Pink Ribbon Barbie doll and the foundation will receive at least $100,000 from the toy company as part of the new partnership.
“The Pink Ribbon Barbie doll celebrates the incredible strength, beauty and resilience of women,” Mattel announced in a statement Monday. “The doll’s beautiful pink gown with attached pink ribbon proudly underscores Barbie doll’s support for the cause.”
The company said the new doll could be used to teach children about breast cancer. The dolls cost about $24.95 in retail stores like Target and Wal-Mart, the company said.
Now, call me cynical, but how is a Barbie doll in a pink gown going to teach kids anything about breast cancer? Sure, kids, getting cancer is all ballgowns and ribbons and prettiness!
Are her famously pneumatic breasts going to come with detectable lumps? Will there be an Oncologist Ken? Will you be able to simulate a mastectomy by spinning her arm, a la Growing Up Skipper, to see one or both breasts disappear and mastectomy scars form? Will her hair fall out from chemo?
Yeah, probably not. That would mess up her ‘do.
Barbara Ehrenreich has written about the pink-ribbon marketing juggernaut, as has Samantha King (author of Pink Ribbons, Inc.), the gals at Feministing, and breast cancer survivor Twisty, who has cast her jaundiced eye over the Komen foundation:
Under the noble auspices of charity, argues King in Pink Ribbons Inc, global corporations, politicians, and regressive white middle class American ‘family values’ are all getting a big shot in the arm from the pink ribbon juggernaut. Corporations secure, with impunity, free publicity and a means to expand their market share via enlogoed ‘awareness’ campaigns. Politicians support virtually unopposable ‘bipartisan’ breast cancer funding initiatives as directed by behemoths like the massively influential and reactionary Komen Foundation and come out smelling like a rose. The rank and file, conditioned by now to believe that there’s no problem shopping can’t solve, are invited to feel virtuous and altruistic whenever they buy a Yoplait yogurt or a pink KitchenAid mixer.
But where’s the activism? The ostensible focus of all this pseudo-philanthropic pink jockeying is a kind of nebulous breast cancer ‘awareness’, rather than any serious effort at prevention or investigation into what actually causes breast cancer in the first place. Furthermore, once all this ‘awareness’ has produced, via mammography outreach programs or self-exam propaganda (both masquerading as ‘prevention’), a positive diagnosis, there’s not any great push to secure treatment for underserved women.
In other words, when you think of a breast cancer ‘survivor’, you don’t picture a poor black grandmother living in squalor without health insurance (and you certainly don’t imagine a woman who, because of sensible research efforts, never got cancer in the first place.) The Breast Cancer Brand woman is a pro-patriarchy white chick: middle-class, straight, virtuous, concerned with maintaining her femininity, and married with two above-average kids. Ordinarily she’d be content with her life as the unassuming, unpaid family caregiver, but she’s forced by circumstances to be plucky, brave, and heroic.
Salon’s Rebecca Traister notes that this image is one that appeals to the kinds of companies forging pink-ribbon partnerships because of the marketing possibilities:
It’s just that when all that stuff gets dressed in the buy-buy-buy mentality — and when what we’re told to buy buy buy is Barbies and vacuum cleaners and electric mixers — it is important to remember Ehrenreich’s points. In the years that she spoke regularly on the topic, Ehrenreich often noted that breast cancer activism was one cause that was largely underwritten by big companies eager to attract an older female buyer, including Revlon, Ford, Tiffany, Estée Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Saks, J.C. Penney and Wilson athletic gear. Many more of these companies have joined the list since Ehrenreich’s damning article. But, she wondered during one speech, “Where were they … when the Women’s Health Movement was fighting for abortion rights and against involuntary sterilization?”
Another option for your charity dollars: Breast Cancer Action.