Noticing the Gap

When I check the stats on my blog I can see what search terms brought people here. More often than not those searches include “boobs.” Really. “Fake boobs,” “animated boobs,” “beautiful boobs,” and of course, a celebrity’s name with the word “boobs.”

It’s not news that our society is obsessed with women’s breasts. Recently I shared this great article by Samara Ginsburg with friends and family and the responses I got were incredible. Many people had similar experiences to the author or knew someone who had. It made me wish we had more of a dialogue through which women could talk about how they are measured.

Women’s complex relationships with their bodies, especially their breasts, become even more complex when illness is involved. As if it were not enough to deal with the health implications of breast cancer, women often face aesthetic questions about their breasts that have nothing to do with health. As Amy DePaul describes in her article Replacing Things Lost, it is often assumed that women will want to increase their breast size after a masectomy. Check out this excerpt:

So it was off to the plastic surgeons officenot a place I had ever envisioned myself, to be honest. My husband accompanied me for moral support, and we idled in the waiting room and then the exam room; he was reading Breast Cancer Husband while I flipped through a magazine. The doctor walked in, introduced himself and sat down on a stool with wheels that allowed him to scoot around the office at lightning speeds to snatch papers and files as needed. A chatty and energetic sort, he explained early on that no one has to undergo reconstruction, which I appreciated, but that if I wanted to, he would help me determine my options. I told him I was certain I wanted to reconstruct.

He pulled out his pen and opened his file and began asking questions, looking over my medical information: Do you smoke? No. Did they find cancer when you had your cervical cone biopsy? No. Good, he said. And then: What is your current bra and cup size, and what would you like to move up to?

Huh?

No, I thought. No, he didnt just imply that I am an obvious candidate for breast augmentation, though some might argue that I was. I looked at my doctor and then my husband, both of whom studiously avoided eye contact with me. In the awkward silence, it occurred to me that my husband might be tempted to weigh in favorably on the augmentation, a move I would have found highly uncool. After all, its one thing for a plastic surgeon to point out your supposed anatomical shortcomings, but its quite another to hear it from the guy whose laundry you fold and put away.

Similarly, the breast cancer awareness movement has turned into an emphasis on “Saving the Boobs” rather than “Saving the Women.” What if we valued women as much as we valued their breasts? And what if we valued women’s health as much as we valued them as decorations? Several examples of advertising that sexes up breast cancer are here, here, and here.

Sexualizing breast cancer will only discourage young women from becoming familiar with their bodies, what is healthy, and what is natural. It trains women to think of their breasts as something for men to look at, or as Ginsburg mentions, objects that don’t even belong to them. Our dialogue surrounding breast cancer should be person-centered not breast-centered, as we are not hosts for our breasts, but rather they are a part of us.