National Feel Your Boobies Week continues…
If there’s one thing that a successful patient has in battling their own disease, it’s assertiveness.
No good ever comes from being passive and letting the disease – any disease – control you.
THE ASSERTIVE CANCER PATIENT is Jeanne Sather’s blog devoted to how she is beating her own cancer.
Along the way, she tackles all sorts of cancer-related topics, from cancer myths to charity work, support groups and kittens. One topic that Jeanne is passionnate about is cutting down on the multitude of, dare we say, “cancer-related crap”.
As she wrote back in September 2007, we should just BOYCOTT OCTOBER. We don’t need pink-themed laundry detergent. Pink gardening clogs. Pink soup. Where does the pinkening of America every October stop?
Web Watch complete agrees with Jeanne – when you are stopped at a traffic light and the car in front of you has a Pink Ribbon car magnet, Pink Ribbon antenna balls, and a Pink Ribbon auto freshener, what are we supposed to think? That the car supports breast cancer? It’s like watching a breast cancer celebration parade float go by. Web Watch know that’s not true, but that’s what it seems like. By blanketing the landscape with unnecessary pink tie-ins, the pink ribbon has seemingly become synonymous not with the fight for the cure, but for the disease itself. That’s a bad marketing image, not just bad marketing.
See who Jeanne picked as the worst product tie-ins in 2007 and 2008.
In addition to what she writes in her blog, Jeanne also does some freelance writing. In a Seattle Weekly article entitled GAG ME WITH A PINK RIBBON, she talks about how the Dahlia Lounge, a fine Seattle restaurant that Web Watch has dined at and highly recommends, created a pink-themed dessert – the proceeds of which were to be donated to a local organization. Jeanne calculated that for each month they would sell about 204 of these $8 desserts, and from those sales the charity would receive approximately $800.
Jeanne’s stance? Skip the dessert and the well-meaning restaurants and businesses that say they will donate a portion of the proceeds – and just send a check for that full bill directly to the charities being supported. She goes on with more examples, such as don’t buy that bag of pink M&M’s for $3 when the charity just gets $0.50. Send the $3 to the charity directly.
Jeanne’s definitely assertive. For her, it works. Assertiveness can work for you as well, if you let it.