Janet McAllister: Unhelpful to brand cancer as sexy

Girl Guides collecting old bras to raise breast cancer awareness. Photo / Martin Hunter.

My 5-year-old flatmate came home recently from Pippins with someone's old C-cup bra that she had festooned with ribbons and sticky tape. Goodness, I thought, are the Girl Guides now awarding arts and crafts badges in lingerie? And pole-dancing perhaps?

Turns out the undies decoration was somehow vaguely related to the Girl Guides' attempt to make the longest bra chain ever. This, apparently, will raise breast cancer awareness.

So that makes it OK. Ha ha! Just joking. Call me a wowser, but it's not appropriate to direct a bunch of little girls to use their artistic talents to gussy-up bras. Even when the activity is caught up in the girly-girl style of all things breast cancer. (Although at least, unlike many women, most 5-year-old girls like pink.)

Breast cancer is a disease with a brand, a strong yet controversial brand that is a darling of arts and fashion fundraisers. The brand was once pink and infantile. As a breast cancer patient, American activist Barbara Ehrenreich was given teddy bears and a box of crayons.

Now the brand is pink and sexy. Thursday's "Live with Love" Breast Cancer "Society" [sic] fundraiser was advertised as "boudouir [sic] themed". The involvement of musician Anna Coddington and her fellow artists is laudable, but the event poster featured a woman reclining with her arm flung back in seductive surrender, pushing her lace-corseted breasts high, as if to say: "Isn't it great that I have my boobs?" Awareness of breasts, rather than breast cancer, is being thrust upon us.

Raising awareness of breast cancer is important. Around 2500 women (and 20 often-forgotten men) are diagnosed with the disease annually in New Zealand and over 600 of them die from it. Early detection can prevent untimely death.

But I'm not going to consider such things just because women on Facebook are being exhorted to say they "like it on the floor". This campaign - ostensibly about where women like to put that female-only accessory, their handbags - is "to increase awareness of October Breast Cancer Awareness month". (Note it's increasing awareness of the awareness, not the disease.) Being sexy is even more important to the brand than say, being informative.

As any stereotyped blonde will tell you, it is actually possible to be both. If we were exhorted to say "I'm gonna do it in the shower/in bed/ in front of the mirror" that would raise far more consciousness. The question in that case is (of course!): "Where are you going to do your next breast self-examination?" And the message sent around to women telling them the "secret" question could also tell them what danger signs to look out for - not only lumps, but also localised pain, rash, dimpling and other changes.

Compare the pink haze obscuring such actual information to the NZ Aids Foundation's very effective sponsorship of Style Pasifika last month. At least three times during the Foundation's 30-second spot onstage, the fabulous Buckwheat exhorted us all to use "condoms and lube". A simple, easy-to-remember, useful message.

Exactly the type of message the breast cancer brand - with all its visibility and pink-washing and gallery exhibitions of breast plaster casts - doesn't own.