As you may be aware, I’m a testicular cancer survivor. That sounds a lot more badass than it is; testicular cancer is extremely treatable if caught reasonably early, and while chemo and surgery are exactly as fun as you’d think they would be, they were not bad relative to many of the other cancers out there. Indeed, if you must get cancer, I can’t recommend testicular cancer enough.
Now, as someone who made it through testicular cancer, I believe strongly in self-checks and awareness of warning signs — especially since I made my treatment worse by ignoring early warning signs, allowing my cancer to hit very early Stage II. And so I’ve decided that, in order to build awareness, I’m going to start a web site called Ballstagram. What I want is this: guys, take a picture of your scrotum. Having the penis in the picture is okay, too. I want good pictures of nice-looking scrota, too, no crappy scrota, and no scrota of men who, like me, have had orchiectomies — nobody wants to look at a scrotum with only one ball in it. And for God’s sake, no pictures of any surgical scars. No, just lovingly-detailed pictures of men’s scrota, preferably young men’s (less drooping). I’ll post these pictures online. And this will promote testicular cancer awareness. I’m awesome, right?
What? I’m not? You think that’s not only not going to raise awareness of cancer, but it’s really just an excuse to post voyeuristic pictures on a website, sent in by well-meaning but naïve young men, the better for women and men to ogle?
Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Boobstagram. I could describe it, but Anne Marie Ciccarella has done such a good job that I want her to do the honors:
An ingenious website (I really really REALLY wish there was a “universal sarcasm font”) wherein women are instructed that “Showing your boobs on the web is good, showing them to your doctor is better.” The website is filled with photographs of beautiful “boobs” in some exquisite lingerie. They have a Facebook page and a twitter feed. Breasts breasts everywhere. All beautiful breasts. The Facebook page looks a bit pornographic and I am FAR from a prude.
It certainly looks awful; I mean, as a person who’s attracted to women, it’s a lot of pictures of breasts, and I’m not necessarily opposed to that, but not in the context of “promoting women’s health.” And not in this way, a series of disembodied breasts, just body parts, lined up for people to gawk at. It literally removes the women affected by cancer from the picture, reducing the threat of breast cancer to a threat to breasts. It seems a lot less like a women’s health site than a site designed by a couple of douchey guys who came up with a sweet plan to get women to send pictures of their breasts to them.
But maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe this is being run by a women’s group that has the best of intentions.
To lend a bit of credibility, there is a “Why” page on this website. The “founders” [Julien GLT (self-identified as the “founder of Boobstagram”) and Lionel Pourtau (a “sociologist”)] introduce themselves and include the credentials that make them qualified to launch such a site and further explain how this site is the greatest way to raise awareness through fun rather than fear. Really? Has France ceded from this planet and moved to a new galaxy? OK… that’s not fair either…..it’s not France. Allow me to rephrase…. Have these two guys gone from human to alien and departed Planet Earth? What the HELL does that even mean? Fear to fun. There’s nothing fun about breast cancer or screening for it either. I was at the screening game for 20 years and being told, “Don’t get changed yet, there is dust on the film, we need more images” …. nothing but terror. Sheer terror. Most times it IS nothing but dust. Until one time, it’s something like cancer.
Of course there isn’t anything fun about looking for breast cancer. Nobody with a functioning brain would think there was. Cancer sucks, and breast cancer sucks worse than most cancers. Yes, it’s important to keep an eye on warning signs, because like all cancers, it’s easier to treat if you catch it early. But it’s a necessary monitoring, like a colonoscopy or a prostate exam — you go through it not because you enjoy it, but because you need to know if you’ve got cancer.
This is, of course, the end result of the stupid “Save the Ta-Tas” movement, which has also given us abominations like this:
Why yes, that is a “breast cancer awareness” van being run by a porn site, urging women to preserve their luscious, heaving breasts, and also reminding people that there’s a website out there that features women who have breasts. Because breast cancer would be really bad if it affected the ability of people to stare at breasts.
I know I’ve said this before, but let me say it again: the problem with breast cancer is not that it takes breasts. Let it take them! Breasts aren’t all that important, really. The women they’re attached to are.
I’m not saying it’s easy to lose a breast; it wasn’t fun to lose a testicle, and that’s about 100 times less visible and 10,000 times less painful. But given the choice between losing a breast and losing your life, women are going to choose losing the breast. Indeed, women being good about checking their breasts and getting adequate treatment means that more breasts may be lost to surgery, because women are getting treatment.
We don’t need to save breasts. Pace Westley, there isn’t currently a shortage of them. What we do need to save is the women they’re attached to. Women need to get breast exams and pap smears and colonoscopies and ECGs and regular check-ups because women are important. Their lives are important. Their health is important. Their breasts? Not so much.
We need to get over this. We need to grow up as a society, and stop trying to save body parts. Body parts are expendable. The people who own them are far more important than any part of them could ever be.
That wonderfully summed up my subconscious internal conflict about all these sorts of promotions. The line: “Breasts aren’t all that important, really. The women they’re attached to are,” really struck me as true. Thank you!
Body parts are not important as compared to the owner.
But we’re such odd animals, and we react poorly to rational arguments. Sometimes it’s more effective to say “doing this will keep you looking hot!” than to say “doing this will keep you from dying!”
Exhibit 1: anti-tobacco campaigns.
But we’re such odd animals, and we react poorly to rational arguments. Sometimes it’s more effective to say “doing this will keep you looking hot!” than to say “doing this will keep you from dying!”
That’s always the comeback; the problem is that the message itself is damaging. Cancer is damaging. Breast cancer is going to require all sorts of bad things, including removal of breasts. Do we want to set women up to feel worse about themselves post-mastectomy? To feel like they’re less female, less desirable, and less than whole? To feel like the loss of the breast is a worse thing than saving the woman? Let’s not even get into the ways this message reinforces patriarchal notions of beauty, and the objectification of women.
And is there any evidence this is helping? Is this going to build awareness of breast cancer? Of course it isn’t. It builds awareness of breasts.
My questions about how the site makes breast cancer “fun” — fun for whom? I would bet that, for the majority of women, looking at a bunch of pictures of breasts isn’t terribly fun. I mean, they’re just breasts. We can see them anywhere, including in the mirror.
Count me as not part of the majority of women. :-P
I love this post. I think Twisty Faster at IBTP has been talking about the problematic, obnoxious nature of these campaigns for a few years, and it’s nice to see other people picking it up, intelligently and sharply.
It depends: how many lives are we saving as compared to how many women are being damaged by the message?
Obviously there would be some marginal benefit at which it could make sense to say “Save your breasts; they’re HAWT!” But I agree that it’s a balancing act.
So I can’t take a position on the overall worth of most such programs without knowing how effective it is. This one is pretty obviously idiotic, though I have no idea how “save the ta-tas” has worked out.
Exactly who decides what constitutes a good-looking scrotum? And how did they gain that right to judge?–Oh, wait, that was the part where you are being funny.
Agreed 100% about the pink madness. My take on it was, it made me feel like women are uniquely sickly and disease-prone and desperately in need of help, while men are hardy and don’t get cancer enough to merit such enthusiasm. Nonsense, of course, but that’s what it smelled like to me every time I saw all that pink stuff. Now there are pale blue ribbons with tags showing a distant, silhouetted man in a suit standing around. Well, as someone who knows some men who have faced prostate cancer, I am glad that it’s receiving due attention…if in fact it is.
But why do all these people have to beg for money from *us*? Could it be because so much money is going to support unpopular and futile wars, and cover-ups for who knows what other shenanigans?
g&w … If they have data that save the ta-tas improved screening rates, I would say it’s probably worth hurting my feminist sensibilities. But if something seems idiotic on its face, I think the burden is on the group doing the idiotic thing to prove it works. I don’t think the burden is on me to not criticize it until I see evidence that some idiotic thing doesn’t work.
I mean, I’m very fond of my breasts and would be very sad to lose them, but I don’t need to see someone else’s boobs to remind me that I would hate to lose mine. Furthermore, given how insecure so many women feel about their bodies, looking at breasts that are probably larger or perkier than our own isn’t going to make the average woman think “gotta stay hot, better check for lumps.”
Forget it, Jake. It’s tumblr.
Nobody is taking this seriously as an anti-cancer site, believe me.
Sometimes it’s more effective to say “doing this will keep you looking hot!”
How does this site send this message to women in an effective way?
Well, Mythago, you and I are educated people so we know all about how to check for breast cancer, but we shouldn’t make assumptions for the rest of the population. I mean, there may be thousands of women who are really concerned about breast cancer but are simply unsure where in the body they have to check. Do they need to check their toes? their elbows? their nose? It’s so hard to figure out, isn’t it? I know it took me ages to figure out which body part was my testicles and which was my earlobes. If only there was a site that just contained a simple set of pictures that could serve as a guide to help women find their own breasts in their own mirrors, so much pointless confusion could be averted.
Yeah.
In general, I’m quite willing to give passes to people and websites that pander to the general ambient level of sexism (or other isms) in society if by doing so they do some demonstrable good. If find the “boobus” to be rather repulsive, but I’m willing to revise this view if they can show statistics that they’re actually an effective vector of decreasing breast cancer rates. Not that I think that’s even remotely likely, but at least they’re offering some actual information if you’re willing to overlook the slimy veneer, and maybe it’s true that there’s some segment of the population for which this works (again, I don’t think that’s the case, but I’ve been wrong before).
Boobstagram, on the other hand, offers absolutely nothing but a slogan. There’s no actual information on that site, just a slogan and a “why” page that feels like it was written in 30 seconds or less. There’s not a single bit of information on *how* to check for breast cancer – there isn’t even a link to that information. All there is is a series of photographs of breasts.
I, too, am glad to see these critiques being repeated. I’d also recommend SCATX’s recent post on the topic and her links to the SCAR Project.
In the comments thread, SCATX reveals a further bit of her sister-in-law’s story that addresses a question that’s appeared here: Do breast-focused campaigns help women? Not only does that story suggest it’s not helpful, but it’s actively harmful.
And my dear sister-in-law, thinking that to be a good mom she needed to breastfeed her child went against the advice of doctors and kept her breasts. Her widower later told me that she regretted that decision and wished she had been able to let go of them earlier, before the cancer (she had the BCRA gene so preventative measures were on the table from the moment the test result came back).
Precisely because her sister-in-law felt her breasts were so very, very important, she delayed recommended preventative treatment. That pressure to “save her ta-tas” killed her.
This, unfortunately, shows that the following statement from the OP isn’t exactly true: “But given the choice between losing a breast and losing your life, women are going to choose losing the breast.” Because our culture trumpets the value of breasts so much more loudly than the value of women, SCATX’s sister-in-law did choose her breasts over her life.
I don’t think there’s anybody left in the western world who is unaware of breast cancer. The number one cancer-killer of women is lung cancer, though. People seem to forget this is even a possibility for non-smoking women. I can’t imagine an awareness campaign for lung cancer getting the same sort of (male) interest.
I would totally take a picture of my balls for testicular cancer awareness. But:
1) I think there’s less awareness of testicular cancer than of breast cancer.
2) Male privilege.
3) Due, in part, to 1 and 2, I don’t think the message would get as lost.
Can I take a picture of my chest to raise awareness of breast cancer in men, which actually is overlooked?
@Hellianne –
Highly recommend SCATX’s blog in general, and following her on Twitter.