Society
Don't let big boobs distract you
Published 10 October 2005
Observations on breast cancer
You may be interested to know that more women have big breasts (size D or above) in East Anglia than anywhere else in the UK - nearly half, in fact. They are closely followed by Wales and then Yorkshire and Humberside, according to Breakthrough Breast Cancer's British Boob Survey, which also found that women living in the south-east have the nation's smallest breasts, that the national average bra size is 36C and that Scottish women and men think about breasts the most.
None of these statistics has anything to do with cancer, but the survey does draw attention to breasts, and uses this to highlight breast cancer. It is also indicative of how comfortable people feel discussing this form of cancer, and how it has become the acceptable cancer that people clamour to support.
Liz Hurley, for example, has supported this year's Breast Cancer Awareness Month by switching on pink lights at Kensington Palace. Marks & Spencer will be selling special pink bras. Even Basildon Bond's watermarked writing paper is being produced in - yes, you guessed it - pink. There are also pink ribbon brooches, pink ceramic hair-styling tools, a pink Burberry trench coat and scarf, and rose-tinted glasses in a pink case from Specsavers. It is fair to say that the breast cancer lobby has conquered the market in what has been coined "conspicuous compassion", by making people proud to be publicly associated with the cause.
This is good news for those with breast cancer, and helps to raise funds for research into a disease that 41,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with every year. But it makes supporting other cancers seem far less fashionable. Have you ever seen a supermodel wearing a T-shirt featuring faeces in order to raise awareness of colon cancer, for example? Have you read about surveys showing which region boasts the biggest testicles, despite the thousands of men suffering testicular cancer?
We must be careful, as we're inundated with pink products this month, not to forget about the cancers that do not lend themselves so well to canny advertising. If enough people do this, we may yet see logos of lungs and testicles and livers and moles, and even bowels, on clothing for sale in Burberry next year.
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