Tag Archives: health

Save the People, Not the Boobies: The Ethics of Breast Cancer Awareness

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Few ad campaigns make me as misanthropic as the breast cancer awareness ones I’ve been seeing at an especially high volume for the past month:

There’s also this video (NSFW).

I hate these campaigns for many reasons. First of all, they make breast cancer all about boobs. Yes, it has “breast” in the name, but reducing an illness as complex and life-shattering as breast cancer into a cutesy “save the boobies!” campaign seems callous and inappropriate.

I’m not sure everyone would even agree that the prospect of losing your breasts is the worst thing about breast cancer, and yet that’s what these campaigns almost universally target. It’s not the “boobies” or “ta-tas” that need to be saved–it’s the human beings who have breast cancer.

It’s even worse when the campaigns are created by and/or targeted at men and involve that hint-hint-nudge-nudge assumption that men should care about breast cancer because men love tits. Never mind that men can get breast cancer too, and never mind that men care about breast cancer not (just) because they care about boobs, but also because they care about their friends, girlfriends, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, and etc. who might get breast cancer, or who already have.

Campaigns like these also completely ignore women who have chosen (or been forced to) undergo mastectomies. If breast cancer research and awareness is all about “saving the boobies,” does losing your breasts mean you’ve lost the fight?

This preoccupation with breasts is probably what inspires awful ads like this one by the Cancer Patients Aid Association, an Indian NGO:

The text at the bottom reads, “One out of every eight women develops breast cancer in her lifetime. Early detection helps recovery. Get yourself examined before it’s too late.” So there you have it. If you get a mastectomy, you’re “making yourself ugly.”

This is all to say nothing of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the hypocrisy and reactionism of which should by now be well-known. (Incidentally, the former Komen executive who was responsible for that move was not content with merely that; she just had to write a book-length screed against Planned Parenthood, as well.) This unethical organization seems to be the beneficiary of most (if not all) of the sexualized ads I’ve seen. I still refuse to give them a single cent, which is difficult given how easy it is to accidentally pick up one of those pink-ribbon-branded products at the grocery store.

On the bright side, this is a great opportunity to explain what feminists mean when we prattle on about “objectification” and “sexualization,” which are closely related concepts that often (but not always) occur together. Objectification is the reduction of a person to their body parts (usually the sexual ones; hence the frequent co-occurence of objectification and sexualization). An advertisement that objectifies women might show, for instance, a single female leg in front of a flashy car, or a woman lying in a martini glass–literally like an object to be consumed. Sometimes men are objectified too, but that seems to be rarer. Ads that objectify people often don’t show their faces (or eyes), thus making them seem less like people and more like bodies.

Sexualization, meanwhile, is when a person (again, usually a woman) is represented in such a way as to arouse the viewer or otherwise connote sex when the actual purpose of the representation has nothing to do with sex at all. You wouldn’t call pornography “sexualization” because the purpose of pornography is to depict sexual acts and to be arousing. But when an advertisement designed to sell cars or alcohol–or solicit donations for breast cancer research–portrays women in a sexual way, that’s sexualization.

The objectification and sexualization of women in the media has a great deal of negative effects, both on an individual level–for the people who view them–and on a cultural level. Check out the work of Jean Kilbourne if that interests you.

However, I am not a marketing expert. If I were, and if I were charged with designing an ad campaign that elicits as much attention and donations for breast cancer research as possible, there’s a good chance I would feel compelled to create an ad like this, because there’s a good chance that this is the kind of ad that works best.

Hence the misanthropy I mentioned earlier. Marketing people know what they’re doing. If this is really the best way to get people to pay attention to this important cause, I would say that not using ads like these is even more unethical than using them–at least until we shift our culture enough that we don’t need them anymore. But that still means that we’re choosing the lesser of two evils. I would rather more money went to breast cancer research than less, but I would also rather we stopped reducing women to their erogenous zones in our media.

After all, I don’t agree with this rubbish that men are “programmed” or “hardwired” by biology to be obsessed with breasts, at least not to the level that our society seems to think they are. As I already discussed when I wrote about public breastfeeding, the sexualization of breasts is not universal to all cultures and time periods. Even if “sex sells,” breasts don’t necessarily have to always be part of “sex,” and I think it would be beneficial to our society if they were not.

For the record, whether straight men’s love of boobs is entirely biological or not, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, as long as it doesn’t infringe upon public policy or trivialize serious illnesses. Besides, you can totally be an awesome (male) feminist and a boob enthusiast at the same time.

Edit: Here’s a great article that basically makes my point for me.

Abortion and Suicide: A Spurious Link

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In South Dakota, it is now legal to require doctors to tell women seeking abortions that they are putting themselves at risk for suicide.

This move is brilliant from a PR standpoint. Unlike banning certain types of abortions entirely or, say, forcing women to undergo invasive screenings that are medically unnecessary, this seems completely apolitical when you first look at it. Don’t people deserve to be informed if they may be increasing their risk for suicide? Don’t we all agree that suicide is a Bad Thing?

However, something tells me that this is actually another attempt to scare women out of (what should be) a normal, socially acceptable medical procedure.

First of all, the inconvenient truth here is that credible research consistently shows little or no link between abortion and poor mental health. One 2008 study reviewed the literature and found that the only studies that seemed to show such a link had very flawed methodology, whereas the studies that were well-designed showed no links. (Damn liberal academics!) And here’s another study that showed no such links. And here’s a thorough debunking of a study that did claim such links:

Most egregiously, the study, by Priscilla Coleman and colleagues, did not distinguish between mental health outcomes that occurred before abortions and those that occurred afterward, but still claimed to show a causal link between abortion and mental disorders.

In other words, that study actually tried to use mental health pre-abortion to confirm a hypothesis about mental health post-abortion. This is simply not how you do science. And it’s especially bad here, because according to the American Psychological Association, guess what the best predictor of mental health post-abortion is?

Across studies, prior mental health emerged as the strongest predictor of postabortion mental health. Many of these same factors also predict negative psychological reactions to other types of stressful life events, including childbirth, and, hence, are not uniquely predictive of psychological responses following abortion.

That’s right. Shockingly enough, the best predictor of mental health is, well, past mental health. And poor mental health predicts poor response to all sorts of stressful events, of which abortion is only one example. Another one being, for instance, childbirth!

Compounding the bad science here is that, unlike physical side effects,suicide isn’t something that just happens to you suddenly and without warning. People don’t just suddenly wake up one morning and decide to kill themselves. Suicidality is a complex process that involves factors like genetics, family history, environment, social support, mental illness, and life circumstances. For instance, here are some things that, according to research, actually increase one’s statistical risk for suicide:

As you can probably surmise, not all of these correlations are also causations. While mental illness and drug addiction can actually cause suicidal behavior, being intelligent and being LGBT probably cannot. In the latter case, the causative culprit seems to be (surprise surprise) institutionalized discrimination and homophobia. Before I get too off-topic, let me point out the irony in the fact that, despite this well-known risk faced by LGBT youth, I don’t see any of these pro-lifers advocating for an end to homophobia.

That’s why something tells me that nothing about this court ruling actually has anything to do with suicide prevention.

Although the court’s ruling does at least acknowledge that abortion probably doesn’t cause suicide, it nevertheless states that “conclusive proof of causation is not required in order for the identification of a medical risk.” This is probably true, but it only makes sense from a physical health standpoint. If studies show that people who get a certain elective medical procedure are much more likely to, say, experience headaches or nausea or numbness, you don’t necessarily need a causative study to conclude that there’s a reasonable chance that these symptoms were caused by the procedure (assuming, of course, that there was no illness present that might be causing them). Furthermore, there’s a difference between saying “This procedure may cause you to experience cramps and headaches” and saying “This procedure may cause you to kill yourself.”

The truth is, mental health doesn’t work that way. A person who gets an abortion might experience mental side effects because of the stress of having gotten pregnant accidentally and been forced to decide what to do, perhaps without the support of a partner or family. Furthermore, any invasive medical procedure can be stressful and worrying for many people–especially one like abortion, which is consistently portrayed as more painful and dangerous than it really is.

And this is all made even more complicated by the fact that the faulty studies in question were actually studying mental health before the abortion. Perhaps a person with poor mental health is more likely to seek an abortion in the first place–say, if they feel that they aren’t mentally capable of raising a child at the moment.

Ultimately, decisions about what to tell a patient should be left up to the people who know most: doctors (with, of course, a reasonable amount of regulation to prevent malpractice). If a doctor can tell that a person seeking an abortion is going through a lot of mental distress, then that doctor may want to gently recommend counseling and perhaps give out some hotline numbers–and training doctors to recognize signs of mental health troubles is always a good thing.

But doctors should not be mandated to fearmonger to their patients. They should especially not be mandated to serve a pro-life agenda.

[Guest Post] What is Sensible Drug Policy?

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It’s another guest post! In this one, my friend and fellow activist Frances discusses the parallels between good sex education and sensible drug policy, and why we need more of both.

Ever since you’re young, you’re taught that sex and drugs are just plain “bad.” Many high school health classes teach you that if you engage in these activities before (or even after) a certain age or point in your life, you are a weak, scumbag failure who will die with a spoiled reputation.

But where the hell is the other side of the story? Why don’t people ever seriously talk about sex and pleasure? Or drugs and fun? Why is it okay for the media to wave it in our face but crazy for our own parents and teachers to give us a healthy dose of balanced information? Our goal is to teach adolescents to “be responsible,” but they’re learning from irresponsible educators.

I founded SSDP (Students for Sensible Drug Policy) and joined SHAPE (Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators) my first year at Northwestern University to try to get a more holistic view of these taboo topics. Sex and drugs both share intense politicization, widespread ignorance, and unforgiving stigma, but you know what I eventually learned?

Sex and drugs, in and of themselves, are NOT bad! A certain amount of irresponsibility is necessary to turn sex and drugs bad.

Before you start freaking out because you think I’m promoting sexual activity and drug use, let’s get this straight. There are certain “objective ideals” that we, as a society have created based on common sense and cold hard facts. Ideally, teenagers wouldn’t engage in sexual activity before the age of consent (16-18 in the U.S.), due to the fact that becoming sexually active requires a whole lot of responsibility, healthy communication, self-awareness, and maturity—characteristics that a lot of adolescents under the age of 18 haven’t acquired yet. And objectively, the best drug use is no drug use, given that every drug—whether legalized, criminalized, or medicinal—has the power to cause some sort of negative physical, mental, emotional, or developmental effect. Responsibility is key.

However, just because abstinence from sex and drugs is the “objective ideal” in many cases, does not mean that abstinence only is the objectively ideal way to educate people about sex and drugs. “Abstinence only” or “Just Say No” education is bad and irresponsible, because when we say BAD! or NO!, we never teach kids to think for themselves, or give them the proper tools to deal with these situations should they ever arise. Instead, when teens have questions like, “Can I get STIs from oral sex?” or “If Tommy can drink 9 shots in an hour, it should be fine for me, right?” their friends will answer, “I don’t know.”

Irresponsible sex education is what leads to the spread of STIs, unplanned pregnancies, sexual assault, teen-dating violence, unhealthy communication and our slut-shaming, victim-blaming, homophobic, rape culture. An adequate sex education is more than just about putting on a condom and getting tested. It’s about teaching teens to love their bodies, moving past stigma and encouraging an honest discussion so that we can reduce the possible harms of sexual activity. Simply labeling sexual activity as the root cause of all sex-related problems is too simple an approach with such a complex issue.

The same can be said for drugs. We have GOT to stop blaming drugs for drug addiction, DUIs, overdose deaths, academic failure, gang violence, rape, teenage drug dealers, and violent illegal drug trafficking. A “Just Say No” drug education based on scare tactics is too simple an approach with such a complex issue. The more extreme the scare tactics, the less likely it is that teens will respect what the words of their health teacher. The nastier the words we use to label and stigmatize drug users and abusers, less likely it is that people will proactively seek treatment. Alcohol itself is not hurting people, but people who use alcohol irresponsibly and decide to drive? That’s what destroys lives. Heroin itself is not responsible for overdose deaths, but a lack of education and respect for the powerful effects of the drug are fatal. A drug education that eliminates the stigma of drug use, emphasizes moderation and responsibility, offers a balanced “pros and cons” list on recreational drugs, and is truthful about the social norms of drug use is what will actually reduce the overall cost of drug use to society. This is known as “harm reduction,” the idea that with any harmful activity, there are necessary precautions we can take to make it “safer” and reduce harm, like fastening your seat belts before a drive!

Education rather than blame is crucial to changing risky behaviors and the policies that facilitate risky behaviors. Sex and drug education and sex and drug policies have a reciprocal relationship. Sex education that teaches women to “protect themselves from rape” makes it harder for rape victims to achieve justice in the court of law, because women learn to take on the burden of avoiding rape, while men are alleviated from the burden to not rape. As our gay rights policies slowly change, the movement will very likely go on to influence sex education surrounding LGBT issues. Our laws change our attitudes, and our attitudes change the way we educate. With drugs, it’s even more obvious. Drug education promoting the idea that drugs are “just plain bad” reinforces the public belief that drugs should be illegal forever. The criminalization of drugs creates the violent drug market that sucks adolescents into drug addiction and the criminal justice system. And when adolescents are addicted to drugs, engaging in violence, barred from higher education, unable to find treatment, and ultimately a way out of this lifestyle? We teach that drugs are bad.

I became the Drug Policy Dealer on YouTube to serve as the bridge between drug education and drug policy activism, integrating the skills of a peer sex educator, the lessons from countless articles I’ve read regarding drugs and drug policy, and just plain common sense. Northwestern University’s SSDP Chapter and The Drug Policy Dealer will be unique in that the main message we send is that sensible drug policy relies on the assumption that the majority of people will be sensible with their drug use. Like I said, it is irresponsible to only preach the negatives of drug use, without accounting for the fact that safe, responsible drug use does occur everyday. By the same logic, it is irresponsible to advocate for drug legalization without fighting for a more well-rounded, all-inclusive of drug and drug policy education as well.

Stay Sensible!

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A Sacrifice They’re Willing to Make: Mississippi’s War on Abortion

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The last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi is perilously close to shutting down thanks to a new proposed law, Mississippi House Bill 1390. The law would require that all doctors performing abortions be board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology (reasonable), and that they also have admitting privileges at a local hospital (not so reasonable).

The reason that’s not so reasonable is because Jackson, Mississippi, home of the besieged abortion clinic, has two hospitals with Christian affiliations, and any hospital can refuse to grant admitting privileges to a physician for any ol’ reason, such as that said physician is a godless heathen who wants to help women murder their unborn fetuses babies.

To make it even better, the law would give the clinic’s physicians (all of whom are board-certified OB/GYNs but only one of whom has admitting privileges) less than two months to acquire them. As Evan McMurry writes at PoliticOlogy, “This is part of the pro-life’s recent death-by-a-thousand cuts tactic: if they can’t overturn Roe v Wade outright, they’ll make accessing and performing abortions so onerous that the practice will be effectively impossible.”

But of course, as it usually is with these laws, things get even more ridiculous. From the HuffPo article:

The State Senate voted to pass the bill Wednesday, but it was held for further debate on Thursday, when lawmakers had an odd exchange over the bill on the Senate floor. Sen. Kenny Wayne Jones (D-Canton) asked Sen. Dean Kirby (R-Pearl), who chairs the Senate Public Health Committee, whether ending abortions in the state would force women to resort to dangerous, back-alley abortions.

“That’s what we’re trying to stop here, the coat-hanger abortions,” Kirby replied, in reference to the abortions provided at the clinic in Jackson. “The purpose of this bill is to stop back-room abortions.”

Okay, first of all. No reputable doctor performs abortions with a coat hanger. In fact, I’m just going to go out on a limb and amend my statement to say, No doctor performs abortions with a coat hanger.

All of the physicians in question are board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology–a certification that I’m pretty sure Senator Dean Kirby does not have.

Incidentally, you know when dangerous abortions do actually happen? When abortion is made illegal. Research invariably shows this. (I know, I know, Republicans don’t believe in science anyway, but it was worth a shot.)

The truth is that making something illegal, especially if that thing is considered absolutely necessary by many people, does not mean it won’t happen anymore. It just means that it’ll happen out of sight, and therefore without regulation. This is why countries that are more progressive than ours are starting to experiment with drug decriminalization, but that’s a whole other topic.

Drug policy is a different ballgame because, while there are many psychological and societal factors that may lead people to become addicted to drugs, most of us can agree that nobody needs illegal drugs in order to have a decent life. Abortion is another matter, however. Unless conservative lawmakers are willing to provide comprehensive sex education and low-cost (or free) birth control (not to mention end sexual assault), there may not be a way to eliminate the need for abortion. For instance, from a comment on the HuffPo article I linked to:

I live in Mississippi. Yesterday I taught classes in the poorest part of the Delta to pregnant or parenting teens on parenting skills. I would much rather teach classes to teens about safe, effective birth control. The state won’t let me. It doesn’t matter how many facts or statistics I roll out…nobody listens. I am frustrated beyond belief.

So that’s what we’ve got.

Anyway, because politicians in states like Mississippi refuse to provide the resources to prevent abortion from becoming necessary, they must face the fact that women are going to get them whether they’re legal or not. But they don’t face this fact.

In the quote from Senator Kirby, which I provided above, he states that his purpose in making abortion unattainable in Mississippi is to prevent women from having dangerous abortions. So basically, his argument is this: we’re going to restrict women’s access to a safe, standard medical procedure in order to prevent them from obtaining the potentially dangerous, unregulated version of that procedure, despite the fact that restricting the safe thing actually leads to an increase in the use of the dangerous thing.

Kirby’s reasoning makes such a mockery of logic and common sense that I had to read the original quote several times before I understood it.

Mississippi’s Republican governor, Phil Bryant, had this to say about the proposed law: “This legislation is an important step in strengthening abortion regulations and protecting the health and safety of women. As governor, I will continue to work to make Mississippi abortion-free.”

Wait a minute. First he wants to merely “strengthen” abortion regulations. But then he says he wants to “make Mississippi abortion-free.” That should convince anyone who wasn’t already convinced that this law has absolutely nothing to do with making sure that abortions are performed safely. Rather, it has everything to do with making Mississippi “abortion-free.”

That’s right, he didn’t even try to pretend this was about women’s safety.

In my opinion, the fact that criminalizing abortion leads to dangerous back-alley abortions is the strongest argument for keeping abortion legal. It’s the strongest argument because it doesn’t lean on emotion or ideology. We can argue left and right about when life begins and when fetuses feel pain and whether or not women have the right to choose what to do with their bodies (hint: yes), but we cannot argue with the preponderance of evidence that shows that criminalizing abortion does not prevent abortion. It merely makes it dangerous.

Pro-lifers’ continued refusal to accept this argument says one or both of these things about them:

1. They are unwilling or incapable of accepting and understanding basic facts about economics and decision-making. That is, despite all the evidence showing the negative consequences of the criminalization of abortion, these politicians (and voters) continue to believe that banning abortion would plunge us all into Fun Happy No-Killing-Babies Land.

2. They understand these facts, but just don’t care. This is undoubtedly the worse alternative, because it means that the pain, injury, and even potential death that will come to women who try to obtain illegal abortions are, to borrow from Shrek‘s Lord Farquad, a sacrifice that Republicans are willing to make.

So, ignorance or malice? Take your pick.

Limbaugh Really Should Educate Himself About Birth Control

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Up until this week, those of us with a shred of optimism and/or naivete could have pretended that the difference between liberals’ and conservatives’ perspectives on birth control were due to something as benign as “differing beliefs.”

However, now that Rush Limbaugh has run his mouth on the subject, I think we can all agree that much of the conservative opposition to birth control is due not to differing beliefs that are equally legitimate and should be respected, but to simple, stupid ignorance.

The following is probably common knowledge now, but I’ll rehash it anyway:

  • Sandra Fluke, a 31-year-old Georgetown University law student, was proposed by the Democrats as a witness in the upcoming Congressional hearings on birth control. Her history of feminist activism and her previous employment with a nonprofit that advocated for victims of domestic violence made her an appropriate witness for their side.
  • Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, turned her down because, he claimed, her name had been submitted too late.
  • The resulting panel of witnesses for the Congressional hearings turned out to consist of absolutely no women whatsoever, which is really funny in that not-actually-funny-way because hormonal birth control of the sort whose mandated insurance coverage was being debated is only used by women/people with female reproductive systems.
  • A week later, she testified for House Democrats, mentioning that birth control would cost her $3,000 over three years. Lest anyone misinterpret her argument as being solely about those slutty women’s desire to have tons and tons of sex, she also mentioned her friend with polycystic ovary syndrome who developed a cyst because she was denied coverage for birth control pills (which would’ve helped because they would’ve reinstated a regular menstrual cycle).

A few days later, Rush Limbaugh decided to insert his expert opinion into the discourse surrounding mandated insurance coverage of birth control. His expert opinion?

What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

The next day, he clarified his views:

So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.

And the next day (allow me to shamelessly quote Wikipedia):

The following day Limbaugh said that Fluke had boyfriends “lined up around the block.”[18] He went on to say that if his daughter had testified that “she’s having so much sex she can’t pay for it and wants a new welfare program to pay for it,” he’d be “embarrassed” and “disconnect the phone,” “go into hiding,” and “hope the media didn’t find me.”[19]

I’m not going to waste anyone’s time by explaining how misogynistic Limbaugh’s comments were, especially since plenty of excellent writers have done so already. However, it continually shocks me how he gets away with saying things that are not only offensive and inflammatory, but simply inaccurate.

First of all, a primer for anyone who’s still confused: except for barrier-based forms of birth control (i.e. condoms and diaphragms), the amount of birth control that one needs does not depend on how much sex one is having. Hormonal birth control works by preventing ovulation, and in order for it to work, it has to be taken regularly and continually. For instance, you take the Pill every day, or you apply a new patch every week, or you get a new NuvaRing each month, or you get a new Depo-Provera shot every three months. You stick to this schedule whether you’re having sex once a week or once a day or ten times a day. You stick to it if you’re having sex only with your husband, and you stick to it if you’re having sex with several fuck buddies, and you stick to it if you’re a prostitute and have sex with dozens of different people every day.

Same goes for IUDs, which last for years.

Therefore, when Limbaugh says that those who support mandated insurance coverage of birth control are “having so much sex [they] can’t pay for it,” he’s not merely being an asshole. He’s also simply wrong.

And for the record, he didn’t even get her name right. It’s Sandra, not Susan. One word of advice for you, Limbaugh: if you’re going to call someone a slut and a prostitute, at least use their correct name. But I guess we should give him credit for knowing which letter it starts with.

I don’t care what your views are on mandated insurance coverage of birth control. I don’t care what your views are on how much or what kind of sex women should be allowed to have (as much as they want and whichever kind they want, in my opinion). Because whatever your views are on these things, you have to agree that these questions should not be getting answered by people who have absolutely no understanding of how these things actually work.

For instance, Limbaugh completely ignored the part of Fluke’s testimony in which she described the problem faced by her friend with polycystic ovary syndrome. This friend’s predicament has nothing to do with sex. Absolutely nothing. For all we know, she’s a virgin.

After all, polycystic ovary syndrome isn’t caused by anything that involves sex. The current medical opinion is that it’s probably caused by genetics.

Unlike some feminists, I don’t think that men should be excluded from debates about women’s health. But men (and women) who show little or no understanding about women’s health should absolutely be excluded from these debates.

You wouldn’t let a doctor who believes that babies come from storks deliver your baby. You wouldn’t let a mechanic who doesn’t know how an engine works work on your car. And you shouldn’t let politicians and commentators who think that you need more birth control if you have more sex decide whether or not birth control will be covered by your insurance.

And, for the record, I also don’t think that Congressional hearings on birth control should look like this: