Field of Women ?

This is a topic close to my heart. To help you understand why bc men would feel awkward in the field of pink women, I'd say imagine you were a woman in a big blue silhouette of a man! Hard to imagine? I suggest it's a crazy concept to have a genderless disease hijacked by the dominant gender and then not work harder to raise public awareness of the plight of the minority group, therefore condemning them to later diagnosis and poorer prognosis.

I know BCNA has done lots improve its presentation of bc as genderless, including degendering the text of all publications and the website, including two men in the biannual conference, retaining Beacon as the newsletter title rather than changing in to Pink Lady, and nominating a day in October as Male Breast Cancer Day.

But the elephant in the room, and this is the hardest thing to change, is that the whole visual corporate colour scheme, and the retro pink Lady logo remain at the core of all marketing efforts. It appears to me that anything pink that will sell gets added to the list of fundraising products without concern for the quality or usefulness of the product. The worst culpriit is the nearly ended pink bun campaign. Now, I get that this is a big revenue raiser for BCNA (and an even bigger one for Bakers Delight) but the product is totally inappropriate. I mean, using a sugary product such as a as sticky sweet bun sends a poor message to the community that is being educated into healthier food. And cancer feeds off sugar. I've tried to suggest BCNA choose one of BD's very tasty, and more healthy, savoury products as a fundraiser, but to no avail. 

So, I fear men are at the end of their concessions, and I get the feeling we'd better be grateful for what we got. So, here's my final request to BCNA. Use the raising of public awareness of male bc as a key performance indicator for success in your media campaigns. Do in any way that works, do it in any colour that works, but afford us the basic right of equality and of achieving disease awareness parity for men with that of women.