Is it bad form, in a NSFW sense, to have "fuck" in the post title?
This is basically the same story as those Facebook memes, right?
All I'm saying is that I saw the title and was very relieved when I checked that Apo hadn't posted it.
My only thought is to make the title into a version of MC Hawking's "Fuck the damn creationists".
Did they go in through her ribs or up through her diaphragm for the operation?
How many people are going to get cancer from the industrial waste produced by the production of awareness bracelets?
A friend of mine with diabetes wanted to know where the "I ♥ Pancreases" campaign was. The more I think about it, the more I believe that the correct response is to just run alternative campaigns for all the other body parts.
I mean, really, a pancreas is a pretty nifty thing.
The Feel Your Pancreas campaign never really got off the ground.
This is basically the same story as those Facebook memes, right?
Yeah, it is. I'm planning on having a preventative radical masectomy in a few years, so I find it personally galling that there's a campaign admonishing me to save my tatas.
A friend of mine with diabetes wanted to know where the "I ♥ Pancreases" campaign was.
The Pope's covered that by canonising St Pancreas.
fabulous. another bj thread.
I have tried unsuccessfully to explain my objections to the pinkation of cancer. The blank stares are really frustrating. "Still. I am doing something."
so I find it personally galling that there's a campaign admonishing me to save my tatas.
Can they be saved for the mantle?
11: Part of the Vatican's campaign to promote pan-creationism?
Can they be saved for the mantle?
I tell my mom, who frets about my fate, that for her 70th birthday I'll give her my breasts in a jar of formaldehyde.
Detesting this campaign seems a bit much, unless maybe I'm not understanding the objection. I'm under the impression that campaigns like this are a big part of what makes breast cancer research so disproportionately well-funded. Sex sells, obviously, and a corollary is that sex fundraises.
When you say you detest this campaign, do you mean that you wish organizations raising money for breast-cancer-research/treatment wouldn't utilize it, despite its effectiveness? I.e., that you think the harm of the campaign (objectification of women? overemphasis on breast cancer in cancer research?) outweighs the benefits (increased funding for breast cancer research)? Or do you just mean that you hate that so many people respond to campaigns like this, vile creatures that they are? Or what?
16 w/o seeing 10. I can see how that would be personally galling. I don't think that's the spirit in which the campaign is intended.
particularly as, as the article notes, the actual campaign is to "raise awareness" of something that all the evidence suggests isn't worth doing.
I don't know have a good answer to those trade-off questions, urp. I wish every disease were sufficiently well-funded. I'm not particularly angry at individuals who are susceptible to this marketing. But the campaign feeds my general anger about sexism.
Is there any data suggesting that research for breast cancer is underfunded compared to other forms of cancer? I'd be kind of surprised by that -- I think awareness of breast cancer is sky high.
The thing that bugs me most about the campaign is that it is such a great example of how public health campaigns live on long past their original rationale, often to the detriment of public health. People doing sex ed continued to promote the idea that spermicides prevent the spread of AIDS long after it the evidence was in that this was not true, and that spermicides might even promote the transmission of AIDS.
Its the same thing here. Self breast exams have turned out not to be useful. There is also the ghost of an even earlier public health campaign, one from the 70s when breast cancer was stigmatized. Sometimes boobie hearters will say the campaign is good because otherwise women wouldn't want to admit to having breast cancer. But this is a barrier that fell forty years ago.
Is there any data suggesting that research for breast cancer is underfunded compared to other forms of cancer?
I don't have time to google now, but I'm under the impression the situation is strongly the reverse--it's vastly better funded than most cancer research. The comparison to prostate cancer is what I think I've seen most often, although I think it's not limited to that (i.e., it's not just that prostate cancer research is disproportionately underfunded).
Self breast exams
I didn't realize this is what the article or the bracelets in question were about--I thought it was a fundraising campaign. Sorry. Regardless, I think the same idea applies--if titillation is an effective way to promote something good, generally we should titillate (not always, probably). (Although the fact that self breast exams aren't useful means we obviously shouldn't be promoting them at all, whether by titillation or otherwise. That seems like a separate problem.)
Surely the relevant advocates would reply to that "funding is high because we got it there with these methods, if we let up it'll dwindle again, and plenty of other disease advocates have taken a page from our book anyway."
I think it's all of awareness/fundraising/promoting self-exams. Not exclusively promoting self-exams.
25: Yeah, but once awareness of your cause is much higher than of parallel causes, that suggests that it's time to let up on the independently wrongful methods (that is, those that suggest that breast cancer is a problem mostly because it interferes with women's capacity to be sexually appealing).
Survival rates for breast cancer are quite high compared to most other types of cancer (prostate cancer and non-hodgkins lymphoma aside). The American Lung Association should really up its game.
16: Here's my analysis of why this campaign, like others of its ilk, is problematic:
There are a great many threats to human health and safety. There are also a number of avenues by which these threats might be reduced. Assuming that there is some scarcity of resources which might be devoted to pursuing various strategies to reduce threats to human health and safety, it would seem logical to attempt to determine which threats are most pressing and most amenable to corrective action, and to allocate resources accordingly, that the most dangerous problems might be dealt with most quickly.
Unfortunately, especially here in the developed world, the resources available for this purpose are not allocated very evenly, and the process by which they are allocated is neither fair, nor democratic, nor transparent. On the contrary, the processes are beholden to a number of elite groups, whose interests tend not to coincide with those of the majority, and who often use techniques of propaganda and public relations to obscure the reality of the situation.
Campaigns such as "I heart Boobies" elide the fact that the decisions about which avenues to reduce threats to health and safety are ultimately pursued are not chosen by the participants, and in fact, some of the outcomes of these processes may be counterproductive and actually work against the stated aim of the campaigns.
Therefore, rather than contribute to the confusing and undemocratic processes now in place through this type of marketing, it would be preferable to consider these questions in an atmosphere free of appeals to emotion or sexual desire.
That's my take on it at least, if someone has a rebuttal that addresses those concerns, I would be interested to read it.
"Look at the nice set of lungs on that lady!"
About to sign off for the morning, but I think 29 and 31 imply a cold, rational, expert-driven, top-down priority evaluation process should take precedence. Which is nice in theory, and working pretty well at the moment, I think, but it's that kind of process that stinted on research on AIDS and women's health and thereby prompted these campaigns. I think our vision of the medical research agenda-setting process needs to be more pluralistic.
I also think it's amusing that I'm the bureaucratically-inclined professional saying this.
Assuming that there is some scarcity of resources which might be devoted to pursuing various strategies to reduce threats to human health and safety, it would seem logical to attempt to determine which threats are most pressing and most amenable to corrective action, and to allocate resources accordingly, that the most dangerous problems might be dealt with most quickly.
Implied: what might be called the "lump of charity fallacy", i.e. that there is some fixed amount of money available for charities and therefore every dollar that goes to cancer awareness is one less going to, say, environmental campaigning. I don't think this is the case. I don't think that, if you suddenly stopped all breast cancer campaigning, all the people who currently donate would seamlessly switch their donations to bowel cancer instead, far less to saving the rainforest or vaccinating Kenyans.
And what about colorectal cancer? 50% five year survival rate, and tell me you couldn't knock that PR campaign out of the park.
And as someone worried that the juggernaut of breast cancer activism is turning into a feminism substitute (can't find the link so arguing).
The officers of the charity most likely to benefit me personally, the Polycystic Kidney Disease Foundation (Motto: "I ♥ pissing", Facebook page color: pale yellow)*, are convinced that the boobie cancer campaigns are making Americans less healthy by sucking up resources that could fight kidney and other diesases. My personal view is that total charitable spending on diseases is so tiny compared to corporate and government spending that it doesn't matter, except to the extent that the boobie campaign funds are used to fund lobbying at NIH.
*Not intended as factual statements. However, they did once have a backyard fundraiser around a kidney-shaped pool.
Implied: what might be called the "lump of charity fallacy", i.e. that there is some fixed amount of money available for charities and therefore every dollar that goes to cancer awareness is one less going to, say, environmental campaigning.
Logically, there are a maximum of 12 causes which can have a whole month devoted to their ribbon campaigns (unless we are all meant to be walking round looking like Prince Charles on Remembrance Sunday). And since December is basically a washout, and who wants their month to be stuck out in the silly season, it might be even fewer than that. Given such, I can certainly see a case for winding down Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and handing it over to the rectum.
36: Two close friends of Buck's went that way. One very young, one not. Having been around for both of those means that that's the cancer I'm afraid of, on the occasions when it crosses my mind.
39: Not so: this charming site (http://www.fundraisers.com/causes/awareapr.html) informs me that April is the month for Autism, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, STDs, Porphyria, Eye Safety (women and sports only), Sexual Assault, Cancer Control and Foot Health.
34: But what I'm arguing is precisely that "I Heart Boobies" is an example of an undemocratic, top-down (as it were) method of allocating these resources. There are elites. Those elites tend to work to their own benefit. They have determined that it makes more sense for them to focus not only on breast cancer as a major public health concern, but that the focus on breast cancer should prioritize certain modes of treatment rather than, for instance, reducing the amount of carcinogenic chemicals in the environment in order to aid prevention. This is accomplished through propaganda drives, which themselves allocate resources away from actual research, treatment or prevention initiatives and towards the advertising industry and the consumer goods industry. Pink T-shirt makers do quite well out of all of this.
35: Not a "lump of charity", but a lump of total available resources, yes. If there was a democratic process by which people were able to freely debate and organize the allocation of resources to various problems, I believe that we would see an overall increase in the funding for, say, tropical disease research. This wouldn't have to come at the expense of breast cancer research funding, but it might, hopefully, come at the expense of breast-cancer-awareness advertising and pink t-shirt funding.
Foot Health
I'm not really certain what this implies, much less what color the ribbon should be.
total charitable spending on diseases is so tiny compared to corporate and government spending that it doesn't matter
There's this, and also, lots of the pink-everything fundraising gives an appallingly low percentage of funds raised to actual cancer research.
It's probably unnecessary to make this explicit, but, further to the parenthesis in 29, what your average douchebag is probably going to take away from this campaign is some sort of approval for the idea that the main reason for him to be concerned about a woman's life-threatening illness is that the illness might constitute a threat to his opportunities for sexual pleasure. Even allowing for the ironic overtones, it's kinda off.
43: I think Digital Underground put it best:
"Now if you wear corrective shoes and you got big bunions, toenails smell and look like onions...go see a foot doctor or something, alright?"
April is the month for Autism, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, STDs, Porphyria, Eye Safety (women and sports only), Sexual Assault, Cancer Control and Foot Health
Christ, TS Eliot wasn't kidding, was he?
43: as far as I can tell, encouraging people to visit podiatrists.
48: Because they're lonely and depressed. Wouldn't you be, with a job like that?
I could swear I read the linked article months or years ago. The line about how it should be "I ♥ My 72-Year-Old One-Boobied Granny" is particularly familiar. But it's dated yesterday. Odd.
36: There was a series of three billboards in SLC that addressed using colonoscopies to screen for cancer. The first billboard had a picture of an older man and said something about how he'd still be around if only he had been screened. The second billboard was just words about getting screened and I think it included statistics. The third billboard was simply "COLONOSCOPY." The third billboard made me laugh because it's such an imperative. You: get a colonoscopy NOW!
47: May, on the other hand, has strokes, skin cancer, arthritis, brain tumours, fibromyalgia, alcohol-related and drug-related birth defects, allergies, asthma, hepatitis, Lyme disease, hypertension, and (unsurprisingly after all that) anxiety and depression.
The evidence is against me, but I like to think that 48 was actually a reply to 47.
I have partaken of the hate for the breast cancer pink crap for quite a while now (see Barbara Ehrenreich's "Welcome to Cancerland," and also Twisty), but recently had new reason to hate it. My sister and I were taking my mom to a hospital to have scans and a chemo port put in for her stomach cancer (ribbon color: periwinkle!), and at the hospital parking lot, a half dozen parking spots were reserved right by the door for breast cancer paitents only. Each parking spot had a sign with a giant pink ribbon on it. Nevermind all the other people who aren't in a state to walk across half a parking lot! We must show the breast cancer patients that we care!
The actual cancer center where she's getting her chemo at least doesn't have any of that crap.
My sister and I were taking my mom to a hospital to have scans and a chemo port put in for her stomach cancer
Oh god, sorry to hear it.
I think poor old April needs a bit of a hand up after that. Maybe we should make it something nice as well, like Belgian Lambic Awareness Month or Mozart Awareness Month.
at the hospital parking lot, a half dozen parking spots were reserved right by the door for breast cancer paitents only. Each parking spot had a sign with a giant pink ribbon on it. Nevermind all the other people who aren't in a state to walk across half a parking lot! We must show the breast cancer patients that we care!
That's really messed up.
56: Actually being spring probably takes some of the curse off it, at least in the temperate bits of the northern hemisphere and excluding NYC this year.
54: you should have parked in it anyway. Who the hell is going to tell a chemotherapy patient that she has the wrong type of cancer?
The thing that gets people in my family is colon cancer. My grandfather had it, my Dad died from it. I'm right at the age where I ought to go for a checkup. That will be no end of fun.
47: Yeah, I know. Way to make me feel like an underachiever. April is nearly half over. I think at least my feet are healthy, and the eye safety one doesn't apply.
Some of those other events sound unappealing too.
55: Thanks. We're at the part now where no one knows what the hell is going on (the chemo is pre-surgery), so it's hard to say how bad it is.
I could swear I read the linked article months or years ago. The line about how it should be "I ♥ My 72-Year-Old One-Boobied Granny" is particularly familiar.
I believe in this context, the correct word is Busted!
Looks like Ms. Orenstein is cribbing from her own work.
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Peripherally related in that it's money wasted in high profile charitable campaigns: This pisses me off no end. Every time some developed world narcissist decides to suck up a bunch of donations to feed his or her ego it depletes the supply of money going to campaigns that actually deliver. Fuck building schools: raise money to recruit and pay teachers. You can teach lessons under a shade tree: My dad did it while the kids and their relatives built a shack to teach in. Local people already know how to cobble together a building out of local materials FFS.
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at the hospital parking lot, a half dozen parking spots were reserved right by the door for breast cancer paitents only
Oh my flipping Christ.
Plantar fasciatis really kind of sucks, so you know orthotics are good. Plus, people with diabetes need to take care of their feet and may not be able to feel the problems. Infections can spread. So, I appreciate podiatrists.
Remission! Goddamn, that just made my day. I
16: When you say you detest this campaign, do you mean that you wish organizations raising money for breast-cancer-research/treatment wouldn't utilize it, despite its effectiveness?
The campaign pretty clearly capitalizes on the objectification of women's bodies already present in society. (A vulgar proof: we haven't seen a similarly successful "grab your balls" campaign for testicular cancer, have we?)
My practical, ends-justify-the-means side says, yeah, grab all the money you can get by trading on the sexism that already exists.
But at the same time, the attention that breast cancer gets over, say, colorectal cancer, is part of a pedestal I don't really want to be on. I want to take the opportunity to point out the sexism.
I think some of the objections to pointing out the problems with save-the-boobies type campaigns are of the "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" variety; i.e., why would you give up research funding for a deadly disease just to make a point about sexism?
But really, women with breast cancer are people, and thus deserve dignity. I think making the point that hey, they not only deserve to have their disease researched, but they even deserve to not be reduced to their sexually appealing body parts in the process, is kind of a radical thing, and important.
a similarly successful "grab your balls" campaign for testicular cancer
Are men supposed to do regular testicular self exams like women are supposed to do breast self-exams? Because I suspect that could be a very successful campaign. Better yet, a combined campaign: "Hey! Can we get a little privacy? We're doing cancer screening in here."
Also, 68 was supposed to end with "heart remission."
Are men supposed to do regular testicular self exams like women are supposed to do breast self-exams?
By which you mean, formerly were supposed to but now are warned against?
73: About that I'm not sure, but a lot of people disregard the usefulness of scrote memorization.
Wait, women are now warned against regular breast self-exams? Because I literally just went to the doctor yesterday and got the standard lecture on doing so.
71: Testicular self-examination is a thing, yes, and it was promoted at me twenty years ago in high school (yipes...). In fact, they made a semi-big deal out of "Breast & Testicle Day", when they split the class by gender and discussed/taught the corresponding self-exams.
Congrats to your mom on the remission, hg. That's the cancer my dad had, and I'm happy to hear about people who have had successful treatments.
Not warned against, but doing the whole purposeful exam thing (as opposed to washing yourself occasionally and noticing any major changes) is now believed to be useless in terms of finding cancers importantly earlier. Obviously, it's harmless, but appears to be a waste of time.
Don't worry about me, guys! I'm still here!
I'm not really certain what this implies, much less what color the ribbon should be.
The colour of the greenish bits in Gorgonzola.
Between fashionable fund raising (a very low percentage, as somebody mentioned upthread) and government/big money funding, what gets stuffed is the research that people can't actually imagine exists unless they're involved in it. Mrs y once worked (as a data clerk) for a childhood cancer research team which was basically doing long term quantitative survival number crunching. Sell that to the trendy kids! They were desperately short of money all the time, even though it was a tiny group and many of them had academic salaries. And yet their results inform treatment protocols (what?) in dozens of diseases.
I have tried unsuccessfully to explain my objections to the pinkation of cancer.
Probably multiply pwned, but have you read Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided? The whole first chapter is about this. It's good. I actually haven't read much of the rest of the book.
I've always been told that testicular self-examination was important. Can't say I've ever acted much on the advice, but I thought it was generally accepted wisdom.
Yeah, I don't know if the advice not to bother with breast exams applies to testicular exams. I have heard advice to sex partners of men to be pushy about insisting that noticeable lumps or changes be taken to a doctor.
Is there a possibility for getting round the reluctance to do the breast/testicular self examination thing in the straight population by persuading men to fondle womens' tits while the women grope the men's balls? Mutatis mutandis for gay people. I mean, I obviously would be a bummer if you found something, but on the thousands of occasions you didn't it seems perhaps more motivating than just doing it for yourself.
I think the deal with the tit-groping is that there's really not much point to it, according to the research. Bag-snatching, if I recall the colorful Welsh idiom correctly, may be more useful, and I have seen exhortations to watch for lumps on your man's balls.
a similarly successful "grab your balls" campaign for testicular cancer
I look forward to the campaign for prostate cancer self-exams.
86: I think it's worth than pointless, as it leads to unnecessary testing and false-positives, no? Kind of like the problem with prostate cancer screening.
I didn't realize that was an issue, although of course it seems reasonable that it should be.
I think the deal with the tit-groping is that there's really not much point to it
Depending on the point intended and YMMV, of course.
Ja, 88 is what I meant by 'warned against'. Not that you're going to injure yourself by doing the exam ('Ow! Have to remember to cut my fingernails!'), but that its most likely outcome is invasive and unnecessary procedures.
I had a disturbing moment back when I worked in a nurse's office as a receptionist, happening across a nondescript grey case in a closet that turned out, on investigation (I was bored and couldn't possibly play any more solitare, and the internet wasn't entertaining yet) to contain a creepily realistic series of dummy breasts for self-exam training. They had internal lumps of the cancer-like kind and the non-cancer-like kind, and you were supposed to palpate them until you'd found all the cancers and differentiated them from the non-cancers.
I guess I'd had the impression from that that it was easy to tell the difference -- that even if the self-examiner was worried by nothing, it probably wouldn't get past an unnecessary doctor-visit. But on thinking about it, that doesn't make much sense, does it -- false positives are always a problem.
Nevertheless, your mileage is variable. My mother (frex) found the lump which eventually killed her all by herself by a bit of auto-groping. Finding it early meant she got several years of quality life she might not have otherwise.
Two people I know who had breast cancer very young also found their own lumps. (One of those two had to convince her doctor to take it seriously, because she was "too young to get breast cancer.") They both found them by chance, though, not in the course of a self-exam. They way they both have described it sounds very TV-movie to me: woman in the shower, all soaped up, maybe singing a little to herself, washing around the boob area, freeze. Look of worry/terror on face. Cut to exam room at the doctor's office.
93: My FIL described a scene at a medical continuing education function where the assembled physicians were invited to practice breast exams on a group of volunteers from the local nursing school (presumably all free of cancer). He noted that one particular volunteer, whom he described as having "pendulous breasts", attracted noticeably more than her fair share of examiners.
94: 95 is the impression I had of what the research shows -- not that women don't find lumps in their breasts, but that they seem to do just about as well at it by going about their daily lives as by doing focused, intentional breast exams.
Hokey Pokey has started with the testicular self-exams, don't worry. On the subject of behavioral differences of the sexes that seem to be predetermined, how about grabbing your junk? Hokey Pokey discovered his hands and then his penis approximately one day apart. Hawaiian Punch has certainly noticed her privates, but with nowhere near the single-minded intensity.
Just for clarity re: #86, bagsnatching does not refer to an affectinate caress or anything you might discover incipient cancer by - it refers to the sort of grab-twist-pull that they teach in women's self-defence classes, executed in the confines of a rugby scrum. Given that Welsh tourism is set to pick up after the Royal Wedding, I'd hate any visitors to be disappointed.
I seem to remember that treating the condition of "hands and penis one day apart" was Doctor Who's specialty in the years immediately after Time Lord medical school.
Personally I have a dislike for the breast cancer types because they're often tools of big pharma and in NZ have, practically speaking, at least once merely shifted money from one pot to the other. (See Herceptin)
bagsnatching does not refer to an affectionate caress
Given that Welsh tourism is set to pick up after the Royal Wedding....
Don't the Welsh have incentive enough to travel already?
Alternative: Really? There is such a thing as "Welsh tourism"? Pray God there are not Mabinogion LARPers.
re: 99
Never having played rugby after the age of about 15, do people routinely wear a cup? Because that'd seem a definitely advisable thing to do.
Breasts are charismatic megafauna.
12: fabulous. another bj thread.
Yes, my thought was, "still on about the '70s porn?"
41: April is also National Financial Literacy Month in the US. For some reason that seemed important to note.
This thread is at 1.08 Kobe and not a single mention of "titties, hurray!"?
Speaking of mild outrages done in the context of worthy causes, the checkout at the canteen in the hospital my wife is staying in (till tomorrow anyway) had bracelets for sale as a fundraiser for child cancer treatment. The bracelets themselves were not that nice and they asked 12 euros fifty for them, a bit on the steep side, but worse, only one euro of that went to the charity it supposedly promotes...
110: What self-respecting Eurozone country allows spending gaps in treating children's cancer? Or is it for neglected non-medical comforts like Child's Play?
Supporting cancer research rather than cancer treatment. The latter is reasonably adequate in .nl, the former always needs more money.
I'M TELLIN YOU, IT AINT THE ESOPHAGUSES. IT'S "THA POLICE"!
You're not gafflin' nobody!
