Companies, like Procter and Gamble (P&G), use this time of year to push cause marketing: a for-profit business using a not-for-profit’s cause to market their product. So even though cyclopentasiloxane—an ingredient shown to cause cancerous tumours in test animals—is the first ingredient in P&G’s Secret Scent Expressions deodorant, people can feel good buying their products because they have plans to donate US$100,000 to the American Cancer Society. This is pinkwashing, where companies mask the bad (sometimes cancerous) parts of their products by exploiting women’s vulnerability to breast cancer.

“Raising money has become the priority,” says Dr. Samantha King in Pink Ribbons, Inc. “Regardless of the consequences.” Distributed by the National Film Board, and directed by Lea Pool, the 2011 Canadian documentary is based off of King’s book of the same title. In it people such as Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer and breast cancer survivor, talk about how the capitalism of breast cancer awareness is serving as a distraction from how the movement originally started, with a sisterhood critically looking at the health care system.

“To expect you to add social purpose to your business just because it’s a good thing to do, is foolish,” writes Olivia Khalili of Cause Capitalism.  “You have a bottom-line and other obligations to meet.  You don’t have extra resources to allocate to ‘doing good.’”

Obviously businesses have a bottom line that doesn’t include helping others for the goodness of it. But where is this money really going? Walks and parties are fun—I’ve done fundraising for cancer research efforts myself—but after the high of solidarity wears off, and the hype dies down, we must ask: what progress health care wise has been made?

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

The case centred on controversial Myriad Genetics, the (now former) patent-holder of the gene mutation responsible for hereditary breast cancer. Perhaps, like many others, you first heard about the gene mutation after Angelina Jolie spoke openly about her preventative double mastectomy last month—launching the subject into hot topic territory. Jolie had the surgery after tests revealed she carried the gene mutation which gave her an 87 percent chance of developing breast cancer.

In that New York Times op-ed, Jolie encouraged other women to be tested for the gene. However, the property rights to the patented gene mutation push the cost of the test over $3,000—even for those likely to test positive, such as women with mothers and grandmothers who’ve had breast cancer. Jolie’s double mastectomy, though seemingly extreme, was a preventative cancer treatment. But with the cost of the test so high, even the option to consider this preventative care was available only to those with the money to spare.

The case was, of course, more complicated than the coverage of celebrity health, though Jolie did bring hereditary breast cancer and this particular gene mutation into the limelight. The biotech industry is up in arms about the Supreme Court’s ruling, afraid the decision will reduce funding for research—gene patents lead to bigger payoffs when treatments hit the market, an attractive prospect for investors.

But many, including civil rights activists, say it’s a win, as the decision opens the field to independent research and study, particularly at universities.

The judges voted unanimously on the issue, and reportedly in line with President Obama’s opinions on the topic. But the decision did not outlaw synthetic gene patenting; companies are still allowed to patent cDNA, the synthetic DNA produced by cloning.

So, here’s hoping healthcare becomes more affordable in the U.S., preventative cancer treatments become more accessible, and clones don’t take over the world.

One of the perks of attempting to forge a career from your home office as a writer is the amount of time you’re able to just sit back and read. I’ve convinced myself that this is “research”, but lately I’ve been reading almost everything, including, I’ll admit, trash.

Which is how I came to crack open a book—that could be considered part of that cringe-worthy genre “chick lit”—about a 20-something woman who’s diagnosed with breast cancer. The character is a lawyer (of course) who works too hard and is suddenly forced to take time off for chemotherapy.

Apart from my frustration surrounding how hard-working women in fiction always have to “take time off” to discover the truly important things in life (i.e.—family and relationships), I’m worried about this blatant focus on illness. Do you work 40-hour weeks? Maybe more? You’ll probably get sick, with breast cancer. The book I read had a tiny pink ribbon on the spine, and a message urging all women to be “vigilant”: so you’d better start getting your mammograms now.

While it’s been the prevailing thought that earlier is always better, American researchers came out this fall and said that mammograms shouldn’t be regularly performed on women younger than 50, because it has no effect on reducing breast cancer rates. And after that statement, all hell broke loose according to journalist Barbara Ehrenreich.

Last week, Ehrenreich wrote a piece for Salon where she discusses reactions of outrage to the new mammogram recommendations. In it she mentions how you could hear crickets from women when the Stupak amendment was introduced in the States, but the following call for fewer mammograms was met with outcries and protests. What’s worse—telling a woman she doesn’t need a mammogram before she’s 50, or denying all women abortion coverage?

She also notes that the medical effects on early, and regular, mammograms could actually lead to tumour growth and breast cancer in some cases.

“I’m not sure whether these mammograms detected the tumor or, along with many earlier ones, contributed to it: One known environmental cause of breast cancer is radiation, in amounts easily accumulated through regular mammography.”

Ehrenreich’s been all over lately, spreading her idea that positivity culture, especially when paired with breast cancer, is bullshit. If you have breast cancer, she says, you need treatment, not pink ribbons. Recently I heard her on NPR, where women called in to share stories of breast cancer groups that were so relentlessly positive, they felt isolated and alone in their sadness and anger.

Breast cancer in particular is an illness that riles up so many in the developed world. In October, everything from bank websites to GAP clothes to NFL playing fields are splayed with pink ribbons. We run, walk and fundraise “for the Cure.” It’s a disease that’s slowly on the rise in third world and developing countries, but which we’ve adopted as our own rallying ground.

I know. I get it. My extended family is something like 80 percent female, so I’m aware of the terror this cancer can hold. But we’re on a teeter-totter, balancing between excessive prevention methods, and the exaggerated cult of positivity that follows if that doesn’t work. Neither works to answer what truly causes breast cancer, and why we’ve only been able to treat it with heavy chemotherapy treatments. And neither works to truly rally women together to find a cure. Instead, we’re left with two camps: you’re either with us, or against us.