Give a s***, and F*** Cancer
Wonderfully vulgar, brutally honest and absolutely empowering, the F*** Cancer movement has been striving to change the way we look at cancer, and the way victims look at themselves. It’s about defiance and the will to fight an often fatal disease.
F*** Cancer’s website has been running since November of 2009, and it’s quite a thing to behold; everywhere in the site are the personal stories of cancer victims and the loved ones they’ve left behind, but thankfully, there are plenty of success stories as well. It’s a candid look at a struggle that is usually very private, and in a way it’s empowering to read these people telling cancer to f*** off.
Vancouver agency Invoke Media is helping F*** Cancer take the next step. They’ve launched a Facebook app to help the charity spread its message by using subscribers’ own Facebook and Twitter statuses to distribute factoids about the disease. It’s all part of F*** Cancer’s F-tember Campaign aimed at education, particularly educating people aged 40–65.
“The first step is really getting our generation to talk to our parents about cancer,” says Yael Cohen, who founded F*** Cancer after his mother was diagnosed with the disease. “Because our research has shown that parents are much more likely to get that diagnostic test or stay on top of their risk profile if it comes from a child. Talk to your parents, take responsibility, help them, so that by the time that our generation comes to that high-risk demographic, we’ll hopefully really internalize the idea that we need to look for cancer instead of just finding it.”
The messages distributed for F-tember aren’t rated G by any stretch, so if you’re squeamish about foul language, you may want to think twice about using this app. But if that’s no problem for you, you should definitely check out F*** Cancer on Facebook and get the F-tember app.
