Race for Life’s branding is cliched and infantile. It’s time to sink the pink | Phoebe-Jane Boyd

Beset upon by pink fluff on all sides, like awaking to find yourself trapped in Barbara Cartland’s musty closet, we’re once more in the midst of Race for Life fundraising season. It’s an important and worthy cause, and yet many hearts (soft, kind hearts) can’t help but sink at the pinkification. “I’ll donate later – I promise” is hesitantly mumbled to beaming participants, and donations are quietly given to the main Cancer Research UK branch instead.

Does avoiding the old-fashioned-gender-cliches-for-charity’s-sake make you a monster? Or should charities receive the same criticism other publicity campaigns get when they use tired stereotyping?

Race for Life isn’t Oven Pride, obviously – it works to save lives, helping those impacted by breast cancer and building a community of support. We know this, we agree with the work. But not always so much with the gender-segregation (men are still banned from running in the races alongside women), and its core brand colour that pulses (however unfairly) with negative undertones, highlighted by such campaigns as Think Before You Pink and Pinkstinks – and the documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc.

Working to balance out Race for Life’s saccharine feather boa-and-cupcake prissiness with some grit are today’s grime-caked Pretty Muddy events, aggressive taglines such as “Hell hath no fury like a woman in pink” and adverts with Braveheart-like line-ups of women ready to run. But can there be any escaping the pink central to it all, and its associations?

After all, the rosy breast cancer awareness ribbons used by organisations such as Race for Life only came about after Estée Lauder turned originator Charlotte Haley’s peachy-orange strips to pink back in the 1990s, after researchers found the colour to be the most “non-threatening”. Ad copy can be packed to the hilt with wrath, dirt, and ferocity, but if its core colour was chosen for its non-threatening impact, then any lately adopted roughness comes across as a weak cover for still-fluffy and asinine insides.

Race for Life’s cutesy and sometimes infantile branding (Real Women Wear Mud, apparently) has a gender problem at its heart. And it’s not necessary. Just because a charity is fundraising for a gender-specific disorder or disease, it doesn’t follow that its efforts should be based around outdated gender cliches to gain support. That belongs to another time; not today, not now. In any case, breast cancer doesn’t just affect women: it’s rare, but men can have the disease too.

A counterpoint to Race for Life’s downsides, if you’re looking for some male-focused charity stereotyping, is the Campaign Against Living Miserably’s (Calm) Mandictionary initiative. “Mandictionary” – sounds just terrible, doesn’t it? Down there with the passive-aggressive phrase “man flu”: it’s that low. Bus stop posters for the campaign feature words such as Mantip (“Disposal of a drink when you’re struggling to keep up with your mates”) and Manbaggage (“A puppy [...] used by a bachelor to heighten ‘cute levels’ in parks”) – so far, so much forced machismo bullshit. But then there’s Imangination (“The capacity to believe in multiple definitions of masculinity”) and Mandown (“One of the 12 men who take their life every day in this country”).

Calm are doing something slightly more subtle – aiming to dismantle the stereotypes that men are pressured to conform to by parodying some of the most trite. Many examples are contributed via Twitter and Facebook by men who are hurt by such cliches. It’s an unexpected, clever way to highlight the harm in gender essentialism.

So how do we get more of these different approaches and voices into advertising and awareness campaigns? The IPA’s diversity quota for UK advertising, marketing and communication agencies looking to hire and promote could be one way. Before three years is up, the industry must have 40% women in senior roles and 15% of its senior people from non-white backgrounds. Prescriptive perhaps, but needed in an industry that isn’t moving quickly enough on its own.

Real charity campaigns – and successful marketing/advertising campaigns – don’t make potential contributors feel resistant and uncomfortable about engaging with them. The industry that puts them together needs new voices that we can relate and respond to. Ultimately that’s the best way to make all of us – whatever our gender or race – dip into our pockets.

Race for Life’s branding is cliched and infantile. It’s time to sink the pink | Phoebe-Jane Boyd

This Khloé Kardashian campaign finally strips ‘empowerment’ of all meaning | Phoebe-Jane Boyd

The first hint that the word “empowerment” had been hijacked by a force with sinister intentions came, for me, back in 2005 during an episode of ITV pop show CD:UK. That dark space.

You might remember the incident: during a quick interview about the single Don’t Cha, Pussycat Dolls spokeswoman Nicole Scherzinger put forward the view that the song was about female empowerment. The interviewer, when told this, looked briefly puzzled.

For Scherzinger – or the media team who’d prepped her to sell CDs – “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me? Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?” was strong feminist rhetoric about sisterhood, a cry for women to support one another and fight the harmful effects of patriarchy as a united front. It certainly wasn’t a narcissist telling a dude she likes that his girlfriend looks crap – it was deeper than that.

Or so the Pussycat Dolls and their marketing department were hoping viewers of Saturday morning TV would think, giving them permission to sing along with the mean lyrics, and go buy the song for their brick-sized MP3 player or Walkman. Dark spaces indeed.

The word “empowerment” being linked to products aimed at women that are actually kind of cruel to women is now ubiquitous. Selling an action film that features one lonely female character who can spin-kick, while also showing full cleavage? Marketers marketing will tell you that she hasn’t been added to the roster of characters as a token to fool the feminists, and she isn’t just there to add boobs’n’buttocks to the poster. No, she’s an “empowering female character”.

When launching any product designed to exploit women who feel insecure about aspects of their physical form, the message isn’t that women are disgusting and sure to die alone if they don’t use it. No: just that using the product will “empower them to feel confident”. Confident that they’re putting in the correct amount of work to fit an ideal instituted by people with more money and influence than them – sure – but mainly, confident. Until the tube runs out.

If you haven’t yet found the word ringing hollow with all this happening, here comes Protein World with another heavy hint of the sinister shenanigans going on with the word “empowerment”: its new campaign featuring Khloé Kardashian. You might remember Protein World as the meal replacement powder company that had its “Are you beach body ready?” ad banned by the Advertising Standards Authority a few years back, after many complaints and defaced train station posters. And you might remember Khloé Kardashian as … one of the Kardashians. According to the press release announcing the six-month campaign we’re heading for, the team-up will be “celebrating empowered young people who want to be their best selves, by looking good and feeling great”. There’s the magic word again: empowered.

The Protein World homepage currently yells the question “Can you keep up with a KARDASHIAN?” – and those who wouldn’t answer that with “Why ever would I want to?” can click through to assorted pictures of Khloé wearing unpractical-looking exercise gear while looking pensive, mixed with an extended testimony about the protein powders. When studying this presentation for signs of empowerment, you can detect straight away that Khloé feels empowered to sit down while looking blankly at a beaker full of liquid.

“Authority of power given to someone to do something” – Khloé is doing something, so it fits the Oxford Dictionary definition of empowerment. “The process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one’s life and claiming one’s right” – sort of that, too. It’s not the empowerment of, say, swinging an axe around, learning a new skill, or flexing intelligence and integrity, but then again, maybe sometimes power lies in being able to sit and stare at a plastic container while being paid to do so. No one is definitely lying.

But, if it’s true, then the word “empowerment” no longer holds any meaning at all now. It’s a word – a feeling, too; a necessity – that has been carefully co-opted and, as a result, drained of its power by those looking to sell. Whenever you hear the word “empowerment” as part of an advertising campaign (Kardashian and Scherzinger-affliated or not) you can be sure those behind it have no genuine motivation to help you, not even inadvertently. See it as a shortcut through the bullshit, and silently thank the marketeer that decided to be exploitative by using it. Empower yourself into considering the word when you see it, and don’t be fooled into buying.

This Khloé Kardashian campaign finally strips ‘empowerment’ of all meaning | Phoebe-Jane Boyd

A moment that changed me: a teacher’s acceptance of my silence | Phoebe-Jane Boyd

Selective mutism wasn’t a diagnosis in common usage among teachers back in the 1980s when I started school; at least, no one ever used the phrase around me. I didn’t hear it until I was an adult, when suddenly it gave a name to “the thing that stopped me speaking for around 25 years of my life”.

It certainly doesn’t feel selective if you’re stuck in it. As described on the website ispeak, selective mutism (SM) is “a severe situational anxiety disorder … [which] generally starts in early childhood but can, if not treated early enough, continue into adulthood. Children and adults with SM are often fully capable of speaking … but cannot speak in certain situations because they are phobic of initiating speech.”

I was just a quiet kid at first – very shy, very jumpy – and I can’t remember exactly why that turned into just not talking any more. There often isn’t a specific reason SM children stop talking; it just happens. I stopped on one of my first days at school, when I mimed colouring a finished picture with a crayon for about an hour, because I couldn’t make myself speak to the teacher. The pretense continued until she realised that no child takes that long to perfect a daffodil.

Physically, I was able to talk. I was fine speaking to my family at home, as soon as the front door closed, but life away from those safe spaces became almost silent, and silent kids who stare wide-eyed at the floor just creep people out after a while. Especially teachers. “She’s very shy” turned into “She won’t answer me”. “She’ll certainly never go to university” in year 2 became “She frequently has a pained expression and does not communicate” in year 5.

‘Selective mutism a lot like being frightened all the time and waiting for the next bad thing to happen that you won’t be able to stop.’ Phoebe-Jane Boyd (centre) with her brother David and sister Tammy.

The problem was, as one of those kids that cared deeply about what adults thought of them, and genuinely valued good behaviour, not speaking was an Ironman challenge of self-destruction. Whenever a new adult with a wavering smile waited expectantly for me to answer them, I’d be torturing myself: “I need to answer her now – I have to, because she’s so uncomfortable, she’s worried. Stay still and she’ll leave.”

It’s difficult to explain the feeling of selective mutism to someone who’s never been trapped in it. It’s a lot like being frightened all the time and waiting for the next bad thing to happen that you won’t be able to stop. It’s not being able to force a decent voice out, even when you desperately try – a tiny whisper will emerge instead, and it hurts. For the kids at school it meant they could press their forearm against my throat in a hallway between classes if they were having a bad day, and it would be OK; they knew I’d just freeze and wait it out. Yelling, punching, stealing, touching – I’d hear my name being whispered as I went to classes, contorting me into a seven-hour school day cringe, adrenaline always raging.

Teacher after teacher would take me aside to gently ask if there were problems at home, did I get on with my parents, had anything changed recently? I’d fume, inside: “You just watched the class dipshit bounce my head off a wall because he doesn’t understand what you’re teaching him, and you’re asking me if the problem is at home?” What would struggle out was a hoarse “No” and I’d mentally file the teacher away as an idiot. Every year, every subject: “Phoebe works hard but never asks for help”, “Must try to discuss ideas more freely”, “If she were not so shy … ”

On a year 10 parent night schedule, I angrily scrawled this note for my mum: “I hate oral work, tell him to be more gentle on me when we do it! Tell him what we did with The Merchant of Venice was stupid and pointless! I get really upset and worried about performing in front of the class! Please tell him!” But teachers are there to prepare you for the world, not protect you by letting you skip reciting Shylock when it’s your turn. The message they’d instilled in me about what would happen outside, after school, had sunk in deep: I was not OK. Until I received a different message, at 17, from my English literature teacher, Mr Pearman.

He had a blank face that showed no concern about whether his classes were taking in the lesson or not. He’d calmly insult kids he didn’t like with words he knew they wouldn’t understand, and enjoy the confused look he’d get back. He told us, while turning on the overhead projector and leaving it empty, about a fun game he liked to play of turning the projector on with nothing on it to see how long the class would stare stupidly at the wall.

“I hear your other teachers saying you don’t talk,” he told me one day, after I’d been in his class a few weeks. “It’s not a problem. I’ve read your work – it’s good. So, it doesn’t matter to me what you say or don’t. You don’t worry me.” He shrugged, and calmly gazed at me; quiet.

Thank you. “Thank you, thank you,” I whispered quickly, mind whirring: “How can I sum everything up to him – he knows already though, doesn’t he? But I want to tell him. I can’t, but I want to do that for him.”

I couldn’t yet. But that was the start.

A moment that changed me: a teacher’s acceptance of my silence | Phoebe-Jane Boyd

Yes, I am excess fat, but spare us the cruelty this summer season | Phoebe-Jane Boyd

‘I suppose the details of a fat summer time are ones I accept and embrace each and every time I get a Large Mac (which is a lot more frequently than I ought to, and yet never enough).’ Photograph: Bloomberg through Getty Pictures

Summer. The time of year for barbecues, music festivals, denim hotpants, side-boob, and salt-spritzed hair. All hazy excellent exciting and younger flesh on display magazines yelling for us civilians to get prepared for “bikini season” and absolutely everyone performing their greatest to seem like individuals females gracing magazine covers.

Excuse me if I sound bitter, it truly is just due to the fact I am – I dislike it. Summertime can be the most hard three months of the 12 months if you happen to be like me. Let me describe a bit about my circumstance, which isn’t a special one particular. I am unwanted fat. My gig isn’t that bad, actually, and I am not part of a group normally considered worthy of vitriol, like, for example, paedophiles. I’m just large. Your run-of-the-mill, rotund, red-faced, glistening, uncomfortably chubby chick.

Summertime is tough for folks like me – there are the irksome physical things to struggle via, of program, this getting the season of constantly feeling slightly damp, always itchy, not becoming ready to hold my encounter unshiny and a wholesome shade shy of fire-engine red. And all this whilst parted from the security of a cardigan. There are so several “enjoyable” situations to be avoided – desperately making an attempt to head off dangerous picnic programs with pals prior to they go too far (“we can sit below that tree over there, on the grass! And we will all undoubtedly be capable to get up from the ground afterwards!”), rickety backyard seating at my nan’s house, attempting not to mainline ice-cream in public yet again.

But the other portion I discover genuinely horrible is curious, a odd side-impact – summer is open season on people of us who consider up a bit much more space in this world. Just lately a female sitting with two men, centered her glazed eyes on me and two mates who were out for our lunch break, and slurred that her buddy had just began doing work at a pie shop.

I imagined: “Please don’t say it, lady. Not in front of my pals who are kind ample to pretend they never see the extra 7 stone of me that should not be there.”

But she said: “YOU seem like you like pies, big ‘un.”

My close friends gasped and looked at me with a bit of pity, there is about three beats in which they whispered outrage as we walked away, and I mumbled: “Yeah, don’t fret – that occurs sometimes …”

Another day, I was strolling down the higher street in my village, and two young children had been heading in the direction of me – two minor blonde middle-class little ones. How sweet, I think. As we passed every other, the little girl remarked to her brother, hunting forward passively: “Gosh, she’s big, isn’t she?”

Ouch. A right hook to the (substantial) gut. But she had a level there’s no room for denial here. I suggest, there is barely any added room for her on the pavement to get previous me.

1 much more illustration: it was the hottest day of 2014 so far and my brother and I – who’s also massive – have been on our way residence. It was a wonderful day, apart from the swollen joints, salty sweat-lined pudgy faces and damp T-shirts, and we have been nearly house free. A black jeep slowed down, and a disembodied voice explained “porky” ahead of driving away. Just a wry variety of “porky”, like: “Appear, you guys, we the two know I have to say it. I’m just going to put it out there, and then go on my way.”

My brother mentioned with a shrug: “At least it only took place after nowadays,” then we went house with bags complete of ample snacks for a party.

I suppose the details of a body fat summer season are ones I accept and embrace every single time I get a Big Mac (which is far more often than I should, and however never enough), and I’m self-mindful adequate to know that becoming this large isn’t very good for me, that barbs from strangers on the street are mixed with truths. Simply because all they had been performing, all any of the people who shouted from vans, or whispered to me on public transport, or stopped on the street to say some thing, was pointing out my decision. Maybe making sure I know for sure that it is the incorrect one particular. But it really is pointless, I know. When I can not purchase clothing on the large street, I know. When my thighs rub together as I walk, I know. I am fat. And possibly that is incorrect, and looks disgusting compared with every person else out in the sun, but what need to I do throughout the summer?

Search at it this way: maybe you are not fat, but you are ugly. Or you are previous, or you happen to be stupid, you happen to be dropping your hair, or you do not seem good in a Hawaiian shirt. You will not match into summertime either, not really. So how about you regular-sized men and women give us huge ‘uns a break when you see us struggling to search like we’re entirely cozy with all this for the next 3 months. We promise we’ll go back to covering up when autumn hits.

Yes, I am excess fat, but spare us the cruelty this summer season | Phoebe-Jane Boyd