I have never been especially fond of pink. To me it separated the girls from the tomboys and I was most definitely the latter. It was girls being unoriginal, mothers locking their children into gender roles (unless on boys, I approve of pink on the male segment of the population), and, as Dooce says, ” a tool of the patriarchy to preserve gender inequality”. Pink on men can be very sexy, not least because it takes balls (or as I like to say, lips) to wear if you’re not in Europe, European, or gay.
In other news, I had a brush with breast cancer: just close enough to change my lifestyle, not close enough to get a tattoo. So I’m very into early detection and openness about the subject in general. Guys like breasts, girls have breasts, this is a subject no one should shrink from (incidentally, I think the same thing about prostate cancer and hope that it starts to get similar press).
But I’m still not a fan of pink. And it really drives me nuts that people buy anything pink, especially in October, because they think it shows that they care about breasts. That said, I lust for a red iPod so maybe this makes me a total hypocrite.
I had recent occasion to peruse the Susan G. Komen foundation’s website and be impressed, once again, at the amount of pink. Shouldn’t that be the color of cervical cancer…? Personally, I think our dollars would be better spend reducing our children’s sugar intake and the medical establishment’s reliance on radiation to detect and treat a disease first discovered because it was caused by radiation. This might make me less of a feminist, but I like to bring up prostate cancer and male genital mutilation whenever the pink equivalents are brought up. This is a backwards, barbaric world we live in, but all people deserve cures, health, and acknowledgment.
I hope that a cure for breast cancer is found. I hope a cure for AIDS is found. And maybe marketing them to the public as “cool” causes is the way to get the kind of money necessary to realize these goals (hey, it worked with me and the nano, neh?), but I hope that cures for people with uncool diseases are found as well. The only reason I care so much about breast and prostate cancer is because they touch me more closely than AIDS…or leukemia. But we only have so many colors in the spectrum. Will brain cancer claim gray or will sickle cell anemia have to wait until AIDS is cured before it can have red? I suppose what disgusts me is the marketization of philanthropy. But I’m in no way immune.
In the mean time, I shall sip my tea, use my new jump drive (which I love, if Hawk is reading this 
), wearing my Alias sweatshirt and Gap jeans, and realize that what really pisses me off is my own hypocrisy.
