How about we ask ourselves why we are living in the midst of a cancer epedemic? Rates of cancer have soared across guess where? the most developed nations - those nations whose environments are full of noxious chemicals. Consider this piece from Patrick Garner:

''According to Dr. Samuel Epstein - an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois School of Public Health - the three main reasons for such dramatic increases in cancer are components in our consumer products‚ carcinogens in our prescription drugs and chemicals in our work environments. These three factors are directly linked to the out-of-control capitalist structure of the United States.

Private corporations want maximum profits‚ regardless of whether or not their products kill the consumer.

The meat industry implants sex hormones in its animals to make them as obese as possible.

When we eat meat produced by these companies‚ we also eat residual hormones that have been proven to cause reproductive cancers in men and women and leukemia in children.

Milk is also highly contaminated because dairy cows are injected with the Bovine Growth Hormone. The hormone can cause breast‚ prostate and colon cancer in humans.

Non-food products like talcum powder‚ deodorizers and lawn pesticides have been proven to be carcinogenic. Those products are still marketed to us because the corporations producing them are making a profit.

If you think our government has serious safeguards in place to protect us from buying these dangerous products‚ you are wrong.

Our senators are little more than a gaggle of wimps bullied by the ruling class‚ dependent on corporations for campaign funds.

Cancer rates are especially high for those who are prescribed Ritalin and oral contraception. These drugs could be made safer‚ but that might affect the profit margin.

What's especially sad about prescription drugs is our tax money pays for the research‚ then the contracts are given to corporations to market the drugs at 50 times what they cost to produce‚ so the consumer is paying twice.

Corporate media has claimed many times that Saddam Hussein killed his own people with chemical weapons - weapons the Reagan administration gave or sold to him.

What corporate media doesn't tell you is America's industrial plants and factories are laden with cancer-causing pollutants that could easily be cleaned up. That could affect profits‚ though‚ so it isn't done.

Therefore‚ our government is allowing our corporations to kill working Americans so those at the top can earn more money.

While our government may not be helping us fight the winnable war on cancer‚ there are many steps Americans can take to make their lives safer.''

Stop messing around, if you have a problem with your own womanhood, visit the lady of the lake to give you advice, in this part of wales,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Llyn_y_Fan_Fach_(1323880330).jpg

http://www.discovercarmarthenshire.com/index_images/hires-images/Llyn_y_...

TOP DRAWER.

lads, with balls,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BgZCmB6iZY

Laurie Penny is aiming her guns at the wrong targets on this one. We've all, as we've grown older lost family member to one sort of cancer or other.

When the Gym I go to holds it's pink week, I will wear my pink t-shirts and get sponsorship for cancer research. Is she saying we shouldn't do that, I can't see the Tories putting in extra funding to replace funds raised by us.

Please don't forget that November is Movember month and it's not far away. It's organised to fund Prostate Cancer research through The Movember Foundation.

All you've got to do is grow a moustache in November and get sponsorship on it.

Do it, it will keep your lip warm in winter.

Stanley Kubrick, a filmatic visionary in his time, I can feel it, Dave, said HAL,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85wCw3ArNhs

I believe the 'meme' is another of Dawkins' irritating marks on the world. I think it's representative of a transmittable complex of ideas, signs, rituals etc. A unit by which ideas are passed from one mind to another. On the internet it tends to mean 'something lots of people have started doing/taking an interest in'. A contagious idea.

One might say contemporary western culture is experiencing meme-cancer.

Laurie, I think you're great and I'm glad you're around, but I'm not sure I agree with you fully on this one. Yes, the 'Check your boobs - or I will' nonsense is insulting, and the 'Like it' game on Facebook is tasteless...

But - sometimes, a breast is just a breast - like it or not. Breast tissue is as good as any other body tissue as far as cancer is concerned, and yes, women have breasts! So if this type of cancer kills (mainly) women every year, and it develops in their breasts, what are we supposed to do? Tell women to check their feet for breast cancer for fear of emphasising the fact that females actually have breasts, or in case it reminds people that men (yes and women) can find breasts sexually attractive?

If these campaigns encourage people to think about checking their breasts, and the thousands of pounds raised from such events go towards paying cancer researchers and clinical trials, I don't think we should shy away from them. I'm happy to put up with annoying status's on Facebook for such a cause - let's face it, we see enough of them when we log in anyway, with or without this.

Cancer doesn't discriminate so why should we? Sometimes it's almost as though you're the one sexualising such things.

Well said Anthony - this is the point I was making in my comment of 22nd October. There is nothing like enough comment on the gross inbalance in respources/attitudes with regard to femail/male health issues.

i have just read this article by laurie penny,and this is such as sensitive topic ,but one thing i do know is everytime you walk down the street say when you go out shopping,everybody you see has got some kinda tradegy going on within there family circle and sadly cancer seems to be the main disease that strikes many folk of all ages whether young or old.

I knew there was a reason all that was starting to just seem creepy...

Soooo shared to facebook.

Turquoise Jewelry

http://www.silvertribe.com/

My mother has survived two bouts of breast cancer, and is now thankfully in full remission. My Uncle died of a brain tumour. I smoke and drink, so I guess I am pretty high-risk.
What most helped my mother was not an awareness month, tight T-shirts or any of the commercialisation that Laurie is (rightfully) complaining about, but her local NHS staff, and MacMillan Nurses. MacMillan Cancer Relief covers all cancers, even the unsexy ones that don't make great adds, or sell T-shirts in M&S.
And we all pay for the NHS through taxes (unless you are Philip Green)
Outside of the comfortable west, more people die from dirty water, and lack of sanitation (42,00 per week), but I doubt we will ever see Claudia Schiffer opening a sewer with Lady GaGa...
http://clemthegem.wordpress.com/

I think this is a great article, whilst I am the "grassroot" fundraisers are doing it for all the right reasons I find the way the commercial sector has jumped on the pink bandwagon distasteful - t-shirts, bras and as I previously read here stickers on bikes?

Would this sector be quite so keen to get support a "brown bowel cancer" campaign, for example.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of the big company stuff is to tick a box on their corporate responsibility checklist.

@PhilDuval, I guess the reason why cancer is a more common cause of death in wealthy countries might be...
If you live in a developed country you're less likely to die of an easily preventable disease, a housefire caused by dodgy wiring, a traffic accident caused by a badly maintained bus...you see the point I'm making.
I'd take a lot of the cancer scare story stuff with a pinch of salt (not too much, though: it's toxic). If you dose a lab rat with too much of anything-benzene, vitamin C, goat's milk, burnt toast, whatever-yes, it's more likely to get cancer. You can then extrapolate the results to give a statistically accurate but ultimately meaningless increase in the probability of getting cancer from exposure to far smaller amounts of whatever it is. Talc is potentially carcenogenic in the same way any fine insoluble powder is: if you get some lodged in your lung, then it could be the site for a tumour in future.
Tax money does not pay for drug research-certainly not in the UK.

I'm not disagreeing with you for the sake of it, or to push some ideological viewpoint: but-as a former research scientist-I know that data can be manipulated to prove a whole range of theories, but not necessarily the truth.

Some of the more stupid marketing techniques might have a lot to do with this herd thing..women and children are often treated as if part of some agricultural scene I've noticed..ideas like herd immunity or even perhaps the idea of a householding husband itself may originate from traditional smallholding farming practices. And let's face it people do seem to love to act like sheep whilst bleating on about doing the right thing.
I tend to agree with marimo above. One wonders what colour ribbon a bowel cancer awareness event should warrant? But anyway what's this word meme mean when it's at home ie here in the UK? Isn't it the French word for self?

My new bike had a little breast cancer awareness ribbon sticker on it. It was a little sticker, with a pink ribbon on it, saying 'Breast Cancer Awareness' - and I thought 'what the fuck?' peeled it off, and threw it away. So I'm not quite sure how much use that was to anybody. And I'm absolutely sure that neither do the people who dream up such wastes of their time.

Don't get me started about people running around in bras and stilettos.

And the biggest question is, when the pinkness has become so pervasive (and I think the last couple of months have seen it increase a lot in the UK) - how do we resist it, have meaningful actions and conversations over cancer, and most importantly, help prevent it?

Laurie Penny complains of sexist sentiment disguised as altruism. She informs us of the reality that "women have bodies that sicken, age and die". Strangely enough, so do men. The difference is, of course, there are no high profile campaigns of this nature to promote awareness of men's health issues, and not the same amount of research and development into, for example male cancers, despite the fact that more men apparently die from prostate cancer than do women of cancer of the cervix. Someone who recently attempted to get such an awareness campaign off the ground reported that he faced opposition from various women's groups.

We are informed that recent studies show Britain spends nine times as much on women's health than on men's, which if correct is a scandal, and a subject which, due to it's political incorrectness, is rarely discussed. When complaining about the Breast Campaign Penny should be mindful of, for example, the screening that is available for women's cancers and the absence of similar screening for male cancers, and think about the sexism that this demonstrates rather than any apparent sexism within the campaign she discusses. Given the huge inequality in healthcare, and given Laurie Penny's dislike of the Breast Cancer campaign, may I suggest that she devotes some time and energy on behalf of male health issues, in the interests of equality?

On behalf of my friend ??, ( whom you have for some bizarre, unexplained reason simply banned from commenting here in a terribly rude fashion)I'd like to say :

Ouch, What a scathing attack on just one of the numerous ways of raising money for Breast Cancer, Laurie.
Unlike you, I doubt very much that the actual Cancer charities are complaining. As long as money is being raised, who cares? I think that should be the real priority here.

Interesting, but the whole argument essentially rests on whether or not the stunts do raise money for cancer charities or save lives. However tasteless you may find these campaigns, if the net result is that they save lives, surely it is better than not saving lives?

Do you have evidence that this: "buying products with a pink-ribbon logo does not necessarily correlate with more money for research and treatment, as it is difficult to attach a tangible value to much of the corporate "sponsorship" of breast cancer charities" is true?

I'm not disagreeing, just curious as to whether or not this has been proven to be the case.

I think it's just as tasteless to use methods for raising awareness for cancer as a stick to beat capitalism with.

Excellent article and well researched. Thank you.

As a socialist and therefore an egalitarian, I often find myself sickened by this cheap and tacky bandwagon surrounding Breast cancer. In part because anyone would think its the only cancer that affects anyone. Whilst I'm aware that it also affects a small number of men, I would welcome half the publicity surrounding Breast cancer to be given to testicular and prostate cancer too. After all, both genders face terrible, life threatening variations of cancer. To me the most tacky aspect of the 'pink campaign' is its utter failure to address male cancers too.

Ouch, what a scathing attack on only one of the numerous ways of raising money for cancer charities, Laurie!
Unlike you I think very few charities out there will be complaining - those pink ribbons do raise money!

People are so gullible. I saw an article opining that cancer could not be found in the eighteen year old mummies that had bilharzia, dental caries and a multitude of parasites that would shame the parasites attached to the UK. tax payer. Incidnetally good old fashion heart disease of the said tax payer maybe induced by tax payer is by far the most common cause of death, as a child of six would guess!

If I were to get cancer of the dick, I wouldn’t care if guys started running around with blue ribbons on their peckers whilst peekin outta their Speedo’s. If Laurie were to get breast cancer, and I honestly hope to God she never does, how pissed would she be about how the money for a possible cure was being raised? If females wish to strut around in stiletto heels showing off their tits..guess what? That’s an attention getter. If it’s not unkind or cruel who gives a f@ck how the funds are raised to rid the world of this killer disease.