Awareness

I do not think that the breast-cancer culture helps women. I agree with Ehrenreich that the Women’s Health Movement of the 1970s-1980s was crucial and very important to help women take a step up and begin to advocate for themselves and their rights as free embodied agents. However, I have often criticized the breast-cancer awareness movement myself. Watching 20-30 people wearing pink t-shirts, pushing strollers and carrying balloons down Main Street this summer made me angry. We’re all ‘aware’ of breast-cancer now. Mammograms are required by most heath insurance companies. Traveling mammogram busses make sure everyone has the opportunity to get one and every gynecologist I have ever spoken to or read has advocated for monthly self-examinations. So, since we’re all ‘aware’ now, why keep marching? I agree with the statements proffered by one of the men interviewed for the article, they’re better off writing a check and moving on, that’s much more effective. I realize this sounds unsupportive of those who are actually survivors of breastcancer but the author seems to have a very healthy perspective on the issue.

We shouldn’t be focusing so much on a cure which hasn’t been all that effective up until this point anyway, we need to be focusing on the cause. Just as those who purport the need to find a cure for diabetes should be focusing on the cause of diabetes in order to prevent rather than treat it. The number of cases of Type II diabetes far outscale the number of Type I. As my boyfriend and I watched the marchers move down the street he turned to me and asked when they were going to have a march for prostate cancer. I shrugged and said I doubted they ever would. Prostate cancer is highly prevalent in men but there is no great movement out there, no prostate cancer matchbox cars (as the author pointed out) and I suppose it’s understood that men will either heed or disregard their doctors advice to seek regular exams for early detection. Yet, with this huge prevalence of a man’s cancer which runs neck-in-neck with this female cancer (thought, unlike prostate cancer, men can and do get breast cancer) it is the woman’s cancer which gets all the hype, all the commercial opportunistic endeavors. I think it’s the same with the way that women are the ones who are most heavily hit in all consumer fields. We are the “shoppers” and we need teddy bears and crayons to make our “boo boos” go away.

Women infantilize themselves by parading around in pink t-shirts crying “save the tatas” and “hooray for boobies!/I <3 boobies” “walkin’ by buns off for boobs.” What kind of derision would a man face if he started making stickers or buttons with slogans like “Bros for balls” or “prostate posse” or “check your junk for cancerous funk” or for penile cancer “liveschlong” or, my friend, Mr. Robinson’s favorite childish slogan I asked him to come up with: “better spread than dead.” (He is a prostate cancer survivor himself.) Mrs. Deery (his wife) came up with, “If you lose your family jewels you’ll never become a prince charming.” The one slogan I managed to dredge up from the internet about prostate cancer was a mundane, “Don’t procrastinate…check your prostate!” Fabulous, right? It’s not that equivalent slogans for male specific cancers are difficult to come up with, it’s just that they are not dignified or proper enough to use for masculine persons but they are perfectly applicable and good for women. We participate and perpetuate our own denigration based solely in our breasts.

Ehrenreich argues that the breast cancer culture causes a woman with breast cancer become someone who is longer a woman, a person, just cancer (459). It “blur[s] the line between selfhood and thing-hood” becoming a composite of organic and inorganic materials (469). She notes that  “Awareness beats secrecy and stigma of course, 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 a mall” (460). It has reached an astonishingly commercial and superficial level. Ehrenreich notes, “The ultra feminine theme of the breast cancer marketplace –the prominence for example of cosmetics and jewelry –could be understood as a response to the disastrous effects on one’s looks. But the infantilizing trope is a little harder to account for” (460).

She writes extensively on the desire of the movement to infantilize women, especially citing the presence of crayons in the tote from the Libby Ross Foundation. She comments, “Possibly the idea is that regression to a state of childlike dependency puts one in the best frame of mind with which to endure the prolonged and toxic treatments. Or it may be, that, in some versions of the prevailing gender ideology, femininity is by its nature incompatible with full adulthood” (460).

I thought it interesting that she found the extensive availability of personal stories and experiences caused the author to compare her experiences to those of others, from the way she describes it, almost obsessively. The same way women compare themselves obsessively on the fronts of appearance, weight, attractiveness, etc.  “There is nothing very feminist—in an ideological or activist sense—about the mainstream of breast-cancer” (461).

The feminists want a cure but they also want to understand the causes of the disease. “’Bad’ genes of the inherited variety are thought to account for fewer than 10 percent of breast cancers, and only 30 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have any known risk factor…Bad lifestyle choices life a fatty diet have, after brief popularity with the medical profession, been largely ruled out. Hence suspicion should focus on environmental carcinogens, the feminists argue, such as plastics, pesticides…and the industrial runoff in our ground water” (461).This puts the feminist breast cancer movements in line with environmental and anti-corporate groups while the fluffy bunny approach to breast-cancer remains mainstream. “sentimentality and good cheer” (462). It is the “Darling of corporate America” and “a way for companies to brand themselves friends of the middle-aged female market.” “Breast cancer provides a way of doing something for women without being feminist” (462). Because the movement is politically correct and a way for corporations to show their love and support for women without having to take a stance on anything controversial, those companies have found ways to cash in on the market of all female buyers by appearing sentimental and empathetic to their cause.

The author notes that all this hullaballoo and great affair begins to look like “a positive embrace of the disease” (462). She found numerous “testimonies to the redemptive power of the disease” (463). While, I am an advocate of finding the good in everything and learning through suffering, I don’t think that the vast corporate sphere needs to have a place in helping women make themselves over through cancer. The author writes,“in our implacably optimistic breast-cancer culture, the disease offers more than the intangible benefits of spiritual upward mobility. You can defy the inevitable disfigurements and come out, more femme. In the lore of the disease…chemotherapy smoothes and tightens the skin, helps you lose weight; and when your hair comes back, it will be fuller, softer, easier to control, and perhaps a surprising new color. ..opportunities for self-improvement abound” (463).

            The companies that fund and perpetuate the breast cancer culture cult are the ones who are cashing in on the $12-16 billion-a-year business in surgery, “breast health centers,” chemotherapy “infusion suites,” radiation treatment centers, mammograms, and drugs” (464-465). Even though, “The benefits of routine mammography are not well established; if they do exist, they are not as great as many women hope” (465). Mammography might not even be successful and sometimes, all early detection does is prolong the amount of time a woman was aware of her condition.

The author summarizes her viewpoint by stating, “America’s breast-cancer cult can be judged as an outbreak of mass delusion, celebrating survivorhood by downplaying mortality and promoting obedience to medical protocols known to have limited efficacy” and that “obedience is the message behind the infantilizing theme in breast-cancer culture, as represented by the teddy bears, the crayons, and the prevailing pinkness” (465).

I think this breast cancer culture makes breast cancer cute, cuddly, pink, approachable, and something which is almost to be looked forward to. It is something which permeates our consumerist existences and yet has little to no effect on the number of women who die from breast cancer every year. The fact that we pour so much time and effort into a movement which produces little to no results is disheartening and a sign that the author’s viewpoint is accurate. The industry which perpetuates breast cancer also claims to oppose it but it cannot successfully do both, though it can rake in vast amounts of money in both arenas. The movement is a rouse to keep us all buying in the name of righteousness while we ignore the real issues and problems at hand. Keep the women happy through material goods and cute slogans but don’t actually take a stand and do something about breast cancer prevention seems to be the underlying motive. I think breast cancer patients would benefit more from having others take the disease seriously and reverently rather than seeing it as a marketing opportunity.