commercializing care

While ribbons and RED products proliferate, have we really become a more caring society? Or is this just a new, fresh (or, same old) variation of self-absorption, one that so easily hides behind the rhetoric of care?

Excerpts from Untying the ‘ribbon culture’, a review written by Jennie Bristow on Sarah Moore’s book Ribbon Culture: Charity, Compassion, and Public Awareness:

For Moore, this is not an example of individual silliness, but a reflection of the extent to which ‘the pink-ribbon campaign is a thoroughly commercial exercise’, which carries the risk ‘that the products will fail to communicate anything meaningful about breast cancer’. It is the commercialisation of causes, which both empties them of all content and transmits messages that are negative and misleading, that Moore sees as problematic. In seeking to understand why the individuals she interviewed wear the ribbons or wristbands that they do, Moore’s account stands out through her refusal to pander to the rhetoric of ribbon culture, which emphasises ‘awareness’, ‘caring’ and engagement with a cause. In reality, these positive rhetorical sentiments mask an anxious, self-obsessed, depoliticised culture.

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What is generally agreed, however, is that the privileging of personal ‘identity’ as a route to finding meaning in life is a fraught process, in which a constant state of anxiety becomes the norm: a process which individuals are never expected to resolve, only cope with. This is the background to the explosion of ‘Ribbon Culture’, in which, as Moore suggests, ‘ribbon wearers’ sense of awareness often manifests itself as worry, rather than a process of rational evaluation’.

The most powerful chapter of Moore’s book examines in depth the pink ribbon of the breast cancer awareness campaign, and ‘the implications of “thinking pink”’. Having already established the extent to which the pink ribbon has become a thoroughly mainstream concern and a consumer brand, Moore looks at what kind of ‘awareness’ is generated by the pink ribbon for those to whom it is more than a fashion accessory. Reflecting the group most likely to wear ribbons, Moore’s interviewees were predominantly young, white, middle-class women. Many, notes Moore, were ‘inordinately worried about breast cancer’. Their ‘awareness’ of the disease was such that they massively over-estimated the number of deaths claimed by it and the likelihood of women their age contracting it, and they were scarcely aware that deaths from breast cancer have been falling for several years.

The character of this awareness – which might more properly be called misinformation – is not surprising given the extent to which information produced by the breast cancer awareness campaign, as Moore shows, deliberately overplays the indiscriminate nature of breast cancer – that it could happen to anybody, that everybody knows somebody who has been affected by the disease, and so on. This plays off individuals’ residual anxiety about their health, lifestyle and mortality, causing them to wear their worry, if not on their sleeve, on their lapel. As Moore suggests, it is difficult to see what is gained by this ritualised anxiety:

‘It is… unlikely that cultivating a sense of worry about the illness is particularly health promoting for those women who do not have breast cancer… These women’s fear has manifested itself in burdensome routines and gestures (compulsory self-examination or wearing a pink ribbon, for example) which speak of a nagging, everyday sense of worry which refuses to be resolved.’

To fear death is one thing. To advertise that fear, in the form of a kitsch fashion accessory bought in department stores that is greeted by others as less controversial than wearing socks with sandals, speaks to the thoroughly morbid undertones of our modern culture of narcissism. Moore does a great job of exposing the orthodoxy of ‘awareness’ for what it really is; challenging the sickness of our ribbon culture requires that we think beyond the pink to care about something less selfish instead.