Beyond Pink

[this is a post I originally wrote on another one of my blogs. I brought  it out again here in honor of the month.  ] 
Gayle A Sulike, PhD, a medical sociologist and 2008 Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities for her work on breast cancer culture, is the author of Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women's Health (Oxford University Press, 2011). Each chapter is followed by pages of footnotes for this carefully researched book that points out the dark side behind the pink ribbon. It is not a cheerful picture, nor a completely hopeful one, as very little true progress has been made in the battle against breast cancer, for all the fanfare of pink products, awareness, and the popularity of "the cause."

Certainly, every woman should read about how mammograms could actually fail women and, in some case, cause harm and should be aware of the risk/benefit ratio, the costs, and the questionable motives of some who benefit.  "Screening mammography is largely responsible for the ever-increasing diagnoses of stage 0 breast cancers, the types that are not technically breast cancers at all." (p.183). Such results stack the deck for the claim that early detection saves lives when the lives "saved" were never in danger in the first place.  In addition to false positives, mammograms can yield false negatives, meaning that the cancer that is there will not be detected. Generally, they are more effective at detection in women over 50 than younger women. In an article that appeared in 2009, "Chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society Dr. Otis Brawley said: 'I'm admitting that American medicine has overpromised when it comes to screening. The advantages to screening have been exaggerated" (p. 20).

Sulike also examines the mythology of the "she-ro" who must rise above her suffering according to the script tied with a pink ribbon. She also touches on "pinkwashing" as a serious problem that gets in the way of true progress. Infantalization of women results from a culture that considers it appropriate to offer teddy bears and Barbie dolls dressed in pink to those afflicted with cancer to show you care. Pink, of course, is the color strongly associated with little girls.  Would men be treated the same way?  Of course, some of this is based on feminist analysis, and reader may just find her take on the significance of Power Puff Girls debatable. But it is, certainly, an intriguing argument.


Her main points are encapsulated both at the beginning and the conclusion of the book. On p. 374 she says:  "Pink ribbon symbolism not only distract the public from the harsh realities of breast cancer and the actions that would be necessary to move toward  its eradication, it also produces a feel-good culture in which the idea that breast cancer is a good cause translates to a belief that supporting it is a good thing that will always lead to good outcomes. The pink ribbon effect demonizes and isolates those who do not happily accept all of the pink goodness the culture has to offer." 

The only weak part of the book is that she does not really build a substantial case for what would work to truly make a difference.  Is it even possible to eradicate breast cancer?  She does say that certain chemicals used by companies are linked to breast cancer, but I'm not quite clear on if she would say that the solution lies there. There are always contributing factors, but so many health conditions do prop up unexpectedly with no known cause. Nevertheless, the book is worth reading for its wealth of information and for its infusion of some healthy skepticism. It's good to  think before going pink or joining up with anything just because it is popular and seems to be  going for a good cause.


I also wrote about pink ribbon marketing last year in

Susan B. Komen for the Cure Criticism Leads to Fallout for Brands

The organization Breast Cancer Action launched Think Before You Pink in 2002 to serve as a watchdog over the pink movement. It calls for action to combat "pinkwashing": the practice of allying with the cause through pink promotions on the very products that contain ingredients linked to cancer. Barbara Brenner, executive director of Breast Cancer Action, states, "Shoppers need to know how much of their money is really going to breast cancer and what's in these products." By drawing the public's attention to the hypocrisy of these companies, Think Before You Pink has succeeded in pressuring Avon to change the formulation of some cosmetics and in getting Yoplait yogurt to go rBGH-free.

For some further reading on this approach, available online, see 
http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/what-color-is-your-breast-cancer/263459/
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-human-condition/2009/10/13/seeing-red-in-pink-products-one-woman-s-fight-against-breast-cancer-consumerism.html
http://brenna09.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/breast-cancer-awareness-month-does-the-pink-ribbon-take-cause-marketing-too-far/

Representing 100 years of childhood

Representing 100 years of childhood

At the rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day, we have created 90 percent of the data we have in just the past two years. And while 10 percent sounds small in comparison, working with the data of the past presents the same challenges as any Big Data project. You have to consider what to include and what to exclude to come up with the questions, correlations, and contexts that relate to your concerns. They are key to the representation of your data, whether in the form of a report, an inforgraphic, or a physical exhibition.

Some of those essential components were missing in  the  Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.  It’s described as “the first large-scale overview of the modernist preoccupation with children and childhood as a paradigm for progressive design thinking. The exhibition will bring together areas underrepresented in design history and often considered separately, including school architecture, clothing, playgrounds, toys and games, children’s hospitals and safety equipment, nurseries, furniture, and books.”

Granted, it is impossible to show everything. Yet, I question the omission of an American Girl Doll. (The company that produced it was sold to Mattel  in 1998 for $700 million). The line was introduced in 1986 and was considered a significant departure from the Barbie style that had dominated the doll market at the time. These dolls represented girls rather than full-figured adults and offered some historical insight with their accompanying books. When they first came out, the $100 dolls also raised questions about how much parents are expected to spend on toys, something worth bringing up in relation to consumerism.

Of course, people get a nostalgic kick out of seeing the toys and furniture they associate with their own childhoods, like classic wooden and Lego blocks, an Erector set, an Etch-a-Sketch, a Rubik’s cube, a Slinky, and a Barbie house.  Still, the toys should have offered more than a trip down memory lane. While  the exhibit points to the rather obvious cause for the proliferation of toys associated with the space age, it does not explore how other toys were also a product of their times.

Aside from what different types of toys represent, there is the evolution within toy lines to consider.  For example, Lincoln Logs also started incorporating plastic and premade windows into its sets.  Tinker Toys evolved from simple wooden forms to plastic ones that included specialized pieces and set in pastel colors that were marketed to girls. These modifications raise questions about materials, imaginative play, and gender that should be considered in such an exhibit.

Without context and explanations, you just have random items that do not signify meaning. As Jean Aggasiz said, “Facts are stupid things until brought in connection with some general law.” The same holds true for data, no matter how big. 

What are little girls made of?

 The full title of Lise Eliot’s book really explains her intent: Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into TroublesomeGaps -- And What We Can Do About It. The way it is structured, she goes through the differences that are “hard-wired” or innate and how the difference set by nature tend to get exaggerated by the nurture effect. Each descriptive section is followed by a prescriptive list of things to do to counteract some of those stereotyped paths that can prove detrimental to both boys and girls.

In her introduction, Eliot asserts that the two sexes do not originate on different planets but on neighboring states: “’Men are from North Dakota, women are from South Dakota.’” The fact is that while “the mean male and female” ranks are not all that far apart, though “it’s only the extremes that make headlines.” Perhaps in the romantic spirit of vive la difference, most of what gets published about men and women highlights points of divergence beginning in childhood or even in the womb.

This book also ends up highlighting differences, though it does point out that some of them are completely due to parental and other response to a baby’s sex. Dress a baby in a pink outfit, and people will comment on how dainty, delicate, and pretty she is. Dress the child in blue, and you will hear altogether different types of comments. Experiments show people respond to the clothes cues rather than the child itself, for they do the same when the clothes are deliberately switched. Parents, of course, have the greatest influence on gender expectations, and already from the time a baby crawls, the boy is expected to be capable of greater challenges in slope than the girl (see pp. 66-67).


However, due to the fact that girls do mature somewhat faster, some parents feel their boys could be at a disadvantage in school with girls who have greater verbal development. Consequently, boys are more often selected by parents to start school later in the practice called redshirting.

In fact, school principals and teachers often promote redshirting for girls, as well, either by advising parents of children near the cut off dates to hold the child back for the sake of better competitive advantage or by forcing the effect on everyone by arbitrarily moving up the cut off date, say from December to mid-October or even September. Despite their claims of expertise, they could be setting people on the wrong track:

Whatever the motives, most research finds the practice of redshirting misguided. Although the older children in a class may have a modest advantage in kindergarten and the first few grades, their academic boost typically fades by later elementary school. There is also some evidence that children who were held back are more vulnerable to risk taking and other emotional and behavioral problems when they reach adolescence of their classmates.

Aside from that, it is possible that their on par performance that is due to being older than their classmates could conceal the fact that they have “true development delays or learning disabilities” that are better addressed earlier than later (144-145).


Eliot does take veer off a bit at times , as she seems to have it in for Leonard Sax.  Sax advocates educating boys and girls in separate schools, a concept that she devotes quite a number of pages to in arguing against it. Though she admits that boys do prove more aggressive and more competitive than girls and that they avoid playing together through most of the elementary school years, she maintains that they should work together in school in the same classrooms. The way she dismisses the records of success for women who have gone to all female schools is by saying that they were atypical – the best and the brightest in their day. Of course, once you start analyzing results in that way, you can dismiss the findings of many studies, including many of the ones Eliot refers to in her own arguments.



My particular greater concern here would be that the book’s premise can be turned on its head by those who would characterize themselves as conservative or “traditional.” Wouldn’t they be able to say that what her prescriptions demand is for people to work against the pink princesses and dolls for girls and superhero and construction toys for boys that they would naturally go for? That is exactly the type of thinking that gave rise to the Lego line “for girl,” which I discussed in a blog post elsewhere.  While I was reading Eliot’s descriptions of how girls play, it sounded to me like a corroboration of (should I say justification?) for Lego’s assessment that girls would not care to build unless they have dolls and accessories and feminine colors to work with.


That brings me to an even more fundamental question is something that Eliot merely touched on but didn’t really explore: the fact that the genders seem to have grown more polarized over the past few decades – just when you would think progress would have narrowed the gap. That is why people are so disappointed in seeing Lego tacitly characterize the standard sets as for boys. The pink bricks and “Friends” sets are supposed to be a godsend for girls who are assumed to otherwise never build once they outgrow the Duplo sets. Even things that were considered gender neutral now have to be labeled as either blue or pink. Based on the advertising and habits of children in the 1980s, people actually did not box boys and girls into such rigid categories as much then as they do now. I would really like to see when and why the road of girlhood started to curve back toward the 1950s .