October is breast cancer awareness month, and the only thing the whole world seems to be able to talk about is how much they love boobs.
Save the boobies, the ta-tas, the jugs. Save the titties, the girls, the rack. Save the headlights and hooters, the cans and the coconuts. Save the breasts, yes—but why not save the woman?
From the “I love boobies” campaign by the Keep a Breast Foundation, to the breast cancer charity in the UK called CoppaFeel!, to an incredibly informative video on pornhub.com on how to self-check for lumps that I can almost guarantee you more men have watched than woman, as a society, we’ve effectively reduced breast cancer to a disease that interferes with our sexual desires.
I think it’s time we consider this troubling trend. We’ve sexualized breast cancer, an awful disease that affects almost two million women every year. We’ve collectively dismembered people with breasts and reduced their meaning to the preservation of their breasts—not the preservation of their lives.
When you put the focus on a woman’s breasts, you take the focus off of her. A woman’s life is at stake, but the cute, fun, and trendy breast cancer campaigns do not empower her—they objectify her. They focus on one of the most stereotypically sexually appealing features of a woman, and don’t even bother to look her in the eye.
I’ve been lucky enough to never experience the pain of someone close to me being diagnosed with breast cancer. But if my aunt, mother, grandmother, or sister were ever diagnosed with breast cancer, I would reject any campaign that made their breasts their defining feature. If they had to go through a mastectomy, I would want them to know that the loss of one or both breasts doesn’t make them any less of a woman.
Making breast cancer about saving breasts is an odd approach, when you really think about it. You never see campaigns for liver cancer proclaiming, “save the livers!” People don’t walk for cervical cancer chanting, “save the cervices!” And male identity is certainly not treated the same way. Testicular cancer is not about parading around in all blue and making clever puns about testes.
Breast cancer awareness has become a trend. It’s become about displaying support in an easy and accessible way. In Denise Balkissoon’s opinion piece in the Globe and Mail last week, she says that breast cancer has been “rather creepily, a dream come true for companies that want to bask in the glow of corporate do-gooding.” She argues that breast cancer has been turned into something fun to be celebrated, rather than a hardship that leaves individuals and families with both emotional and physical scars.
That’s exactly what we saw when the NFL’s big pink bubble was popped this past week, when it was discovered that the wearing of pink gear in support for the disease wasn’t actually raising any money. They took advantage of a feel-good cause that made their supporters feel like they were doing something right for a change. Unfortunately, we all should have expected nothing less from such a league.
I don’t mean to discount the funds and awareness that breast cancer campaigns have raised. But turning a debilitating disease into objectification and fixation on one part of a woman’s body rather than her identity as a whole is problematic and disappointing.
