Reddit reviews Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women's Health

It is due to a combination of slick marketing and the fact that everyone has a mother. Breast cancer is vastly overfunded relative to other cancers in terms of mortality and morbidity. Worse, this pink ribbon shit only spends its charitable money on "awareness". Note that awareness does not include:

• Research
  
• Treatment
  
• Concrete prevention (like mammograms, genetic testing, etc)
  
  It does include things like TV ad spending and bumper stickers.
  
  So if you're a media organization (or even a person) that wants to sound charitable, this is a great way to maximize seeming like you care about doing something. Unfortunately its generally a waste of money.
  
  You can google up tons of stories about women in terrible stage 4 breast cancer situations that pink ribbon organizations want nothing to do with, since at that point they no longer seem like plucky survivors. There's various good books on the subject such as http://www.amazon.com/Pink-Ribbon-Blues-Culture-Undermines/dp/0199933995.

The main beneficiary of Susan G. Komen charitable activity is the Susan G. Komen foundation. They expend giant effort getting airlines to paint their airplanes pink and getting major league baseball to use pink bats, etc. That's mostly it. "Awareness" might be a worthy cause when the problem is obscure and underappreciated, but everyone is pretty aware of breast cancer. It's like making people aware of hurricanes.

Komen also suppresses or marginalizes case studies that don't end well because they subvert the Komen meta-narrative of strength and victory over cancer. So if you are a woman who gets a terminal prognosis Komen is brutal to you, basically denying you exist.

Here are two interesting books that explain this stuff in sad and terrible detail: Pink Ribbon Blues and Pink Ribbons, Inc..

Reading them will make you mad.