To Pink or Not to Pink

      Breast Cancer Awareness month was last month and I’m coming to the party a little late.  Here I am wearing one of my new favorite shirts which is a “thanks for playing” gift to those who ran a 5K last month promoting breast cancer awareness.  No, I didn’t run in the race, but the shirt is comfortable.  Plus, I’m intractably against breast cancer!  And, I’m not embarrassed to say that on social media. After all, breast cancer kills 42,000 people each year, and 400 of those deaths are men.  Nearly everyone knows somebody, or knows a family, who has been affected by breast cancer.  I have known people who both survived breast cancer and who have succumbed to its poison.  Who wouldn’t be against this terrible disease?

  Being against something in principle or doing something that makes a difference are two very different things.  While I’m against breast cancer in principle, I’ve not done much to combat the disease except wear a shirt with a pink logo. Every year it gets easier for men to wear pink. I’m from that generation of men who were raised to think pink was a color for girls.  Any man of my generation who wore pink was teased with comments like, “He sure is comfortable with his masculinity” or “He’s embracing his inner feminity.” It has taken decades for the color stereotypes to lessen.  (I actually looked at buying a hot pink dress shirt recently, seriously considering it before buying a safe blue dress shirt instead).  And, I think one of the reasons for this lessening is breast cancer awareness.

     The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (https://ww5.komen.org/) has excelled in its well-planned breast cancer awareness campaigns to increase charitable contributions, promote life-saving screening techniques and services, and de-stigmatize a devastating disease.  Meghan Mahoney and Tang Tang, in their popular textbook, Strategic Social Media: From Marketing to Social Change, report a popluar meme strategy during Breast Cancer Awareness month that went viral.  Women were sent private messages through Facebook asking them to list their name and the color of the bra they were wearing to their Facebook feed without explaining to the men in their lives what that post meant.  Other “fun” activities followed with the same format.  There are various explanations for why those particular memes went viral.  They were silly fun.  They didn’t require much effort.  Refusing to participate meant they might be accused of being against breast cancer awareness.  The conspiratorial nature of excluding men made the activity attractive.  Whether the viral meme did anything for breast cancer is still being debated.  There is no conclusive proof that contributions increased.  And, breast cancer awareness was not included in any of the public Facebook postings.

     Elamari Botha and Mignon Reyneke in their May 2013 article, “To Share or Not to Share: The role of content and emotion in viral marketing” published in the Journal of Public Affairs, concluded that people are more likely to share memes and videos on social media if they are familiar with the topic and have an emotional response to the content.  Breast cancer is familiar to most people and evokes powerful emotional responses making it an ideal subject for a social media campaign, especially when compared to less well-known diseases like the rare acute lymphoblastic leukemia.  That’s as good an explanation as I’ve read for why women made those memes go viral.

     Chipping away at stigma for breast cancer and instilling sympathy for breast cancer survivors has been a slow and arduous process.  I think social media techniques do no harm in the process of awareness.  I can’t tell you the exact moment I decided that wearing pink was no longer anti-masculine.  I suspect that breast cancer awareness campaigns through the years have been one of the factors.