The Spleenville HQ Chronicles

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Saturday, October 24, 2009

Don’t Think Pink

Ann Althouse is sick of the pink breast cancer obsession. You know what? So am I. It’s all of a piece with the nation of neurasthenic hypochondriacs we’ve turned into. It’s not good enough to know about a disease, each disease has to have a “campaign” the purpose of which is to make us “aware” that somewhere someone has this disease and you could get it too! So wear this ribbon to signal your awareness! Like the problem of people not knowing about diseases is so huge and urgent. And they’ve run out of single-color ribbons, I do believe, and are probably by this time going into patterns.

But the breast cancer “campaign” is special, because it’s considered primarily a disease of women (though men have breasts too and they can get cancer in them—my ex-fiancé was one of them, he had to have some pre-cancerous things removed from his moobs a few years back), and thus a variety of pseudo-feminist canards have been tacked onto the business, which means we get people believing things such as were trumpeted by one of her commenters here:

Yeah! It’s TERRIBLE that a disease that was ignored and shunned for years would receive any recognition!!!

I’ve been hearing this about breast cancer for years now, and I’ve come not to believe it. So I countered with:

Breast cancer was “ignored and shunned”? Since when? Sorry, the whole “breast cancer victims were treated like crap until our new Enlightened era of non-stop talking about it because men hated women” sounds like so much propagandistic crap. I’m pretty sure that breast cancer was always considered a serious problem just like every other cancer, and that no one “shunned” anyone, even back when no one knew what to do about people with cancer except to give them laudanum for the pain. People just didn’t used to make as much fuss about themselves and their ailments as we do today. And since we are all now supposed to be attention whores, the idea of keeping one’s problems to oneself is looked upon with horror.

I mean, I know that back in the bad old days, doctors did dismiss some womens’ complaints of illness with “it’s just hysteria because you’re a woman,” but they didn’t do that because they thought women were useless or deserved to suffer, they did that because they didn’t know any better and they sincerely thought that many illnesses were actually manifestations of mental or emotional problems and that a variety of treatments for such, from stern talkings-to to sedatives, were the proper solution. Also, early detection of cancer was impossible then—by the time most cancers can be detected by non-high-tech methods it’s pretty much too late. In any case, I’d like to know where the idea that breast cancer was ever considered such a demerit to a woman that she was “shunned” came from. People with leprosy were famously shunned, but leprosy isn’t cancer. It’s probably a mishmash of half-digested knowledge about past medical practices combined with high school memories of reading The Yellow Wallpaper.

Update: I forgot to add a note about my current funding campaign! It’s for my Emptywalletitis, which is a side effect of Funemploymentosis, a very serious disease that people are afraid to talk about because they’ll be shunned! It’s time to be Aware! But this disease has a cure—all you have to do is click on the Paypal button on my sidebar! And you don’t even have to wear a ribbon, though if you want to go right ahead. My personal favorite colors are forest green, royal blue, deep violet, and wine red.

Next day update: Kathy weighs in. You know, I had forgotten all about that episode of All In The Family. In fact, I have blocked most of the later seasons of that series out of my mind—you know, when it stopped being a funny show where the “lessons” on racial prejudice and so on didn’t get in the way of the funny stuff about Archie ranting at Meathead and telling Edith to stifle herself and became a Concerned Television Program About Problems In Our Society. All I remember is that one where Archie half-reluctantly joins a white supremacist group and Michael won’t let him hold the baby.

And a friend dragged me to see Footloose in the theater because she was nuts over Kevin Bacon, and all I remember thinking is “why did the town ban dancing? Since the action that precipitated the ban was one of those teenage car crashes, why didn’t they just take away the car keys from everyone under twenty? The kids could have been going on a fishing trip…” If you thought too hard about that movie, it fell apart like a paper bag in the rain. John Lithgow’s preacher dad was much too nice and cultured to come up with stuff like “dancing is of the devil” or whatever it was he said, and he had no control over his daughter, who was sleeping around. And banning dancing would seem to contravene the Third Amendment, especially the “right of the people to peacefully assemble”—because the dancing ban extended to the stock uptight adults the movie was populated by. And so on. And now I can’t get that goddamn Kenny Loggins song out of my head.

Posted by Andrea Harris on 10/24 at 05:59 PM
Of Interest • Permalink


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