Before this week, you probably never gave much thought to where the Susan G. Komen Foundation gives its money. Not because you don’t care about ending breast cancer, which kills over 400,000 Americans each year, but because you were busy extricating yourself from a giant pile of pink consumer crap. Who has time to read nonprofit financial reports when you’re staving off a tide of rosy lipsticks and loungewear? In her 2001 report on her own experience with breast cancer and the accompanying cult of infantilizing kitsch, Barbara Ehrenreich sees a classified ad for a “breast cancer teddy bear,” complete with pink ribbon, and prays, “Let me die of anything but suffocation by the pink sticky sentiment embodied in that teddy bear.”

Thanks to Komen CEO Nancy Brinker, Americans can buy pink colored products from a huge number of chain retailers with the peace of mind that they are purchasing “with purpose to end breast cancer forever.” “’Awareness’ beats secrecy and stigma of course” concedes Ehrenreich, “but I can’t help noticing that the existential space in which a friend has earnestly advised me to ‘confront [my] mortality’ bears a striking resemblance to the mall.” Everything from halftime shows to handguns has been blazoned with the Pink brand. Not to mention the cottage industry required to affix pink ribbons to the remaining products which cannot be literally “pinkwashed.”

It’s no small feat that this mega-charity has successfully branded a color, making pink synonymous with fighting breast cancer. According to an old New York Times profile, Brinker is well aware of her achievement. Thanks to Brinker, “breast cancer has blossomed from wallflower to the most popular girl at the corporate charity prom.” Her numbers are indeed impressive. Brinker brought in $420 million in FY2010 alone, and spent a whooping $141 million on public education campaigns. In a public health climate scrambling just to keep ahead of emergency care, that kind of investment in prevention is extraordinary. Brinker has responded to criticism that she is branding a disease, by telling the grey lady that “America is built on consumerism . . . To say we shouldn’t use it to solve the social ills that confront us doesn’t make sense to me.”