Marvel, Komen, and Pinkwashing

Today I found an article on The Mary Sue about Marvel's new push to spread awareness about breast cancer. Specifically, male breast cancer. From what I gather, the covers of eight October releases will have special pink covers, and all the October releases will have an ad trying to break the stigma of male breast cancer.

Now, normally I'd sigh and accuse Marvel of being a dick because they're only focusing on the disease as it pertains to their male readers when they definitely have female readers as well, but this is a special case. People tend to forget that men can get breast cancer too - not just fat guys with "man boobs," the guy I knew who had it was fairly skinny - and there's this huge femiphobic stigma around it, where guys feel ashamed of having a disease almost exclusively associated with women. So in this case I'll give Marvel and Komen some credit. Besides, at this point we all know about breast cancer.

But not a lot.

You see, I'm always wary of drenching products in pink to promote breast cancer awareness, often selling them with the promise that proceeds will go towards breast cancer research - or pinkwashing as it's commonly called. At best it's a marketing scheme used to promote some products over others - if you have to pick between two products, you'll likely go with the one promising to promote cancer research, even though the actual amount donated is usually pretty scant and typically capped at a certain amount. Even products like the Marvel comic books that aren't being used to raise money are still exploiting a devastating disease to generate profits - and I'm sure some people will be lead to assume the comic books will help support cancer research; if you look at the above cover, next to Captain America, it says "Benefiting Susan G. Komen for the Cure." At worst, the product in question actually contains chemicals linked to cancer development. Obviously comic books won't give you cancer, and probably aren't terrible for the environment (maybe?), but this is still a pretty obvious push to give Marvel brownie points and give them a competitive edge over DC Comics, at least for this month. I for one am kind of disappointed that Susanna Polo didn't touch on this in her article.

And y'all don't get me started on Susan G. Komen, who withdrew funding for Planned Parenthood for stupid political reasons. I don't care if they took it back, it was still a dick move.

So all in all, I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. I'm glad someone's drawing attention to male breast cancer and trying to remove the stigma, especially for such a young audience, but there are some aspects of this campaign leave a bad taste in my mouth. I'll definitely bring this up in future panel discussions.

Final thought, at least it's Marvel, leaving DC's Wonder Woman virtually untouched.