Pink Washing...

I recently watched an excellent documentary called "Pink Ribbon Inc." which really raised a lot of questions about just how a pink ribbon can 'save the ta-tas'.
When I was in art school it was quite before we had the kind of nude models you always see in the movies and such. It wasn't until my second semester that we had any women that were not grandmothers. One of the women (who I believe was named Barbara) was posing in a cave set (I still have the drawing). When I got to the part where I was drawing her breasts I noticed I couldn't get them right. Then I realized that one of here breasts was significantly less massive than the other and had scars on it.
At that moment I became more aware of breast cancer. Around the same time one of my aunts had found a lump and was told she might have to remove something the size of a golf ball from her and she said something like "you can't take something that big from these little breasts" (my grandma told me the story so she might have actually said titties or something). And I realized how much more devastating it must be for women who don't have bosoms to spare like Barbara did.
I'd probably seen Barbara naked three of four times before (and by time I mean 3 hour sessions four days a week) and didn't put it together.
Now all this awareness of mine didn't do anything to move us closer to curing breast cancer. With all the money being put into breast cancer awareness we have to ask: just what are we aware of? Okay we know it exists. Do we know how to prevent it? Do we know what causes it? Do we know how to cure it?

The answer my answer is "not as well as we know how to organize marathons for it and raise corporate profits"

My knowledge of this issue is not much but my bullshit detector is going off for the following reasons:

-Research is biased towards the companies funding it. Putting a corporate faces on breast cancer could be influencing the research. Pink Ribbon Inc (you can stream it on Netflix) presents the argument that it is.

-"awareness" seems to be an out dated goal "education" and "research" seem more relevant  Saying we need to increase breast cancer awareness seems odd to me.

-Breast Cancer foundations don't seem to care what companies participate. This bothers me for the same reason it bothers me to let cigarette companies make their own anti-smoking ads.

-There are companies who own the patents on different varieties of cancer cells. Which means that only they can run tests on it because it is somehow their intellectual property. If breast cancer awareness were effective this would be common knowledge. It isn't though it is in the courts right now.

-Yoplait's mail in tops seems to be doing more good for the post office than it is for breast cancer.

- Ty Burrell stars in a commercial that boasts that Mastercard will donate every time you make a purchase making you a real hero in the fight against breast cancer. The fine print says it is $.01 on every purchase over ten dollars. This commercial is in heavy rotation on Hulu so from my non tv watching point of view it appears to be their main marketing strategy.