I Blame The Patriarchy

Regular readers know that, news-wise, CNN confuses me, and that I have all but kicked the NPR habit (it seems fantastic, but El Rancho Deluxe gets only one radio station, and it only plays one song: that Red Hot Chili Peppers slow dance where the dude yodels in that weird accent about how he doesn’t ever wanna feel like he did that day), with the happy result that pop culture’s gnarly substrate — urgently breaking news — rarely filters down to the lab here at Spinster HQ until a week or two after everyone else has moved on to the next closeted gay Republican outing. This programming suits me and my eccentric recluse lifestyle perfectly. Seriously, must I know about every deranged serial killer’s murderous rampage? One deranged serial killer is very like another. Once a person has apprehended that serial killers serially kill, the philosophical implications may be considered grasped; reviewing a continuous stream evidence of the phenomenon is not only unnecessary, it’s prurient.

But, out of the loop though I be, even I have heard about this no-mammograms-until-you’re-fifty malarkey, and it probably won’t blow your lobe to hear that it blew my lobe. The report made particularly gikky reading in view of the recent Stupak craptacity. America just feels like taking a big old televised crap on women’s basic health care this week, I guess. If, after reviewing the stunning and sweeping misogynist antics our government has pulled over the past couple of weeks, a person could stand up and announce with a straight face that patriarchy doesn’t exist, he’d have to be a complete imbecile.

I allude to the absurd recommendations, released Monday by the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force, concerning the age at which women should begin queuing up at the old mammogram machine. They used to say 40. But now they say 50, and only every other year.

Check this out: the “harms outweigh the benefits.” Not just for under-fifty mammograms, but for over 75 mammograms, and — this one really kills me — breast self-examinations!

Wha?

That’s right, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force says women shouldn’t be taught to touch their own boobs. The harm outweighs the benefits!

The dreadful harm from which they seek to protect us?

Anxiety.

Anxiety is bad for ladies. Worse, apparently, than blowing off the timely diagnosis of life-threatening illness.

Anxiety! Are they fucking kidding me? Does the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force think women pass their days carefree, lounging on puffy clouds of pink velvet laundry eating Boston cream pie-flavored Yoplait? For fuck’s sake, I don’t know a single woman whose lobes aren’t fucking soaking in anxiety just as a matter of course. I slurp down a couple of Ativans every morning with my Bloody Mary or I can’t leave the house. Anxiety is pie for women. It’s death that tends to slow us down a little.

Here’s an anecdote. One time I came down with breast cancer myself. I had the impertinence to come down with it at the age of 46. How did I know I had cancer? I happened to be giving myself one of those harmful self-exams and found a tumor the size of Guam up in that mug, that’s how. Did I subsequently experience anxiety? Hell yeah, I did. Do I prefer anxiety to death? Hell yeah, I do.

Of course, nobody really gives a crap whether women suffer anxiety. That’s just a lot of smoke up your ass. If they did give a crap, they’d make rape illegal or something. What they’re really so concerned about is that mammography can have false positives, which means expensive biopsies that insurance doesn’t want to pay for. But for crying out loud. Wouldn’t you rather have a biopsy that turned out to be unnecessary, than not have a biopsy that turned out to be necessary?

If I’d followed the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force Recommendations, I would be dead. Dead, dead, dead. As it was, I was pretty fucking sick.

So I’d like to shove my entire 46-year-old malignant tumor up the U.S Preventative Services Task Force’s entire ass.

Note: mammography is stunningly imperfect. It’s only useful in detecting cancer that’s already there. Which is to say, it’s a cure-based tactic. This makes it vastly inferior to preventative measures — vaccines, elimination of environmental carcinogens, etc — that might preclude cancer in the first place. Also, mammography is, as are all cure-based measures, useless for women who can’t afford subsequent treatment.

You know what else? Everyone should have access to free genetic testing to determine whether they have the breast cancer mutation. If you’ve got the mutation, your chances of tumoring out before age 50 are, like, 80%. Currently that test costs like 4 grand, and good luck getting your insurance company to cough up for it.

The Blogulation Department here at Spinster HQ has been on sabbatical due to auntly apathy and writer’s block.

The deadly apathy/writer’s block combo, which results from intermittently spasmodic crystalline antimatter anomalies in the obstreperal lobe — brought on, no doubt, by extended megatheocorporatocratic interference — is also responsible for my having chucked college, all my rock bands, my juicy restaurant critic gig, and of course, my science fiction novel.

But today I crawl out of my lair to present something for you fans of pictorial cancer blogs. Reader Julia emailed me recently with a link to her mastectomy website. Quoth Julia:

When I was going to have my mastectomy I tried to look up surgery photos online and couldn’t find any. This is understandable; women don’t often want to be photographed topless and especially not when they’re frightened and vulnerable. There’s also a very small window of opportunity to decide whether or not to photograph something like that and figure out how to make it happen. Since I couldn’t find photos when I wanted them, however, I decided to figure out how to make it happen. I had my entire mastectomy photographed as well as my hysterectomy and my port installation and a bunch of other things.

Julia does not lie; there are no mastectomy photos online. Veteran blamers may recall that I (and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done this) uploaded a few gross post-operative pix featuring my staples and blood-bags and bruises and scars and so forth (see below), but it never occurred to me to document the actual surgeries, on accounta I’m stupid, and besides that shit makes me hurl.

Julia’s hypothesis — that women don’t feel like flaunting their chests on the internet when they’re sick with a fatal disease — is right on the money, but I submit that there’s more to this dearth of mastectomy documentation than that.

I allude, as so I often do, to repellent social mores oozing forth from the Cult of Breast Cancer Survivorism: the brutality of treatment must be hidden from view if the cancer-industrial complex is to continue flourishing (at the expense of sick women) in the opulent manner to which it is accustomed. As per the Global Accords Governing Breast Cancer Patient Behavior, the breast cancer patient doesn’t photograph her surgery. The breast cancer patient (unless she has the effrontery to die from her disease) is a Survivor ™, a dainty little pink teddy-bear-lovin’ non-feminist who has bravely put all that unpleasantness behind her, who purports to have experienced immeasurable personal growth as a result of her illness. Meanwhile, as an ambassador for The Cure, she wears a pink scarf to protect the world from her scary chemo baldness. Her amputated breasts are “reconstructed” so the boob-lovin’ public won’t have to confront the horror of her amputations.* She’s a fighter, but not an activist. She’s plucky, but doesn’t challenge the status quo. As Samantha King writes in the enlightening Pink Ribbons, Inc:

[Women] are discouraged from questioning the underlying structures and guiding assumptions of the cancer-industrial complex. The culture of breast cancer survivorship does not, in other words, embrace patient-empowerment as a way to mobilize critical engagement with biomedical research, anger at governmental inactionk or resistance to social discrimination and inequality, even if its history is bound up with attempts to do just this.”

People can’t find out how really fucking gross treatment is, because if they did they might start thinking, hey, maybe preventing breast cancer — as opposed to waiting for women to get sick and then slamming them with a series of debilitating, barbaric procedures — is a good idea. But prevention is not in the interests of the megatheocorporatocracy. There is just too much filthy lucre to be made from selling the romantic notion of “cure.”

So, thanks, Julia, for pioneering the field of Internetian (rhymes with “Venetian”) breast amputation documentarism.

Also, fucking nice tattoo, girlfriend!

_____________________
* I never miss a golden opportunity to poop on the concept of breast reconstruction. This surgery serves no purpose except to appease the patriarchal demand for femininity by preserving the appearance of funbags. It’s not like the procedure actually reconstructs a breast (a breast is not a lump of abdominal fat relocated to the chest. A breast contains a functional mammary gland to nurse infants.). What this reconstruction procedure does is, it constructs a totally useless, cumbersome protuberance. The only reconstruction going on is the reconstruction of the patient’s feminine compliance. Nobody’s telling dude breast cancer patients to reconstruct their manboobs.

Pah.

Inevitably, women who have opted for reconstruction will take offense at these remarks. Don’t be silly, reconstructed women. Patriarchy, not you personally, is to blame for the expectation that you endure more surgeries than are necessary for your health. Post-operative fancy-free flat-chestiness is a luxury enjoyed only by a fortunate few who can afford to spit in the eye of the Beauty Ultimatum.

1. While awaiting phlebotomization yesterday at Cancerland, I thumb through a copy of People magazine. Here is what expert sexologist Bristol Palin has to say on the efficacy of magic fundamentalist christian abstinence-juju sex ed:

“If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex,” says Bristol, sitting at her parents’ lakeside patio table. “Trust me. Nobody.”

2. Here is what my oncologist, Dr Cure, had to say during yesterday’s routine quarterly palpation/ lifestyle /mental health lecture:

“You literally need to have your head examined.”

“Not so fast, lady. Didn’t you just examine it?”

“You are, in fact, clinically crazy.”

Dr Cure is dissatisfied with my cynical worldview. She thinks patriarchy-assimilation therapy will fix me right up. When she revealed the news that it was colonoscopy time, for example, I failed to burst into song or whatever. I suppose Dr Cure celebrates her colonoscopies with a catered affair and a string quartet in a tumor-shaped hot air balloon floating over the Grand Canyon at sunset.

3. While in a fitting room at the mall trying on a pair of shorts, I overhear a conversation between the sales woman and a guy in the next fitting room. The guy is asking the sales woman will his new pants shrink. The sales woman has been waiting all week for the opportunity to impart her laundry knowledge. She looses a torrent of laundry tips on the guy: all shrinkage happens in the dryer. Dryers in this day and age are too hot. Never put clothes in a hot dryer. She even dries her jeans unhotly. The guy interrupts her.

“Oh!” woman answers. “Of course you don’t do your own laundry.”

The guy had wanted to know if the clothes were idiot-wife-proof.

Have you ever, while you were packing into cardboard boxes all your spinster auntly accouterments (I allude to the complete Proust — in French — that you keep on the mantle, as if ; ceramic baby-smoking-a-cig figurine; giant rubber toad; 80’s vintage 4-track w/ gazillion basement recordings on cassette) run out of newspaper? Requiring an emergency run to to the U-Haul depot on Ben White Blvd? On a Saturday?

Admittedly, you are between a rock and a hard place here. If you don’t replenish your packing supplies, your whole Ambitious Plan comes to a grinding halt, at which point all you can do is fester on the lime green recliner, surrounded by cardboard chaos, emitting muffled sobs.

But if you do go the the U-Haul on Ben White Blvd on a Saturday — which U-Haul is, you will discover, held in the highest possible esteem by all other South Austin residents as the most desirable Saturday destination in Central Texas — you will be 48th in a queue of sweaty truck-renters, few of whom possess magnetic personalities, and each of whom requires an extended period of personal quality time with the U-Haulist behind the counter.

To be perfectly accurate, there are two U-Haulists behind the counter, thus two lines of sweaty truck-renters. But, as is required by rent-a-truck law, only one of the U-Haulists possesses sufficient security clearance to operate the top-secret truck-rental computer. This slows transactions down to a maddening trickle, which has the effect of escalating the anxiety amongst the clientèle, who by now are packed in cheek to jowl like hogs to the slaughter. The interminable line, the incompetence of the customer service dudes, the overwrought frenzy of movers who see their security deposits slipping away with each passing minute — you get the picture. U-Haul on a Saturday is like the IndyMac Bank on Failure Day.

If you conclude from the above that I chose, last Saturday when I ran out of wrapping paper, to go to U-Haul rather than sit weeping in my corrugated prison, you are correct. After waiting 25 minutes to spend twenty dollars on two boxes of paper, I dropped one of them in a puddle in the parking lot and was nearly creamed by a speed demon piloting a 17-footer.

Well, my obstreperal lobe blew right then and there, all over the dented hood of some poor schlub’s eggplant-colored Saturn. On the way home, with no internal regulating mechanism to prevent it, an imp of the perverse caused my car to turn in at the Bluebonnet quick shop, where I grabbed a roadie* from the handy ice bin and heard myself utter the most beautiful words in the English language: “pack of Marlboro reds, and make it snappy.”

Four-and-a-half packs later, it is Tuesday, and the self-preservational blaming gas produced by my blown lobe (obstreperone), has begun to kick back in. I have called my oncologist and renewed my date with Chantix. I love Chantix. Apparently there are six or seven people in the world who are not transformed by this anti-smoking drug into homicidal maniacs, and I am one of them.

Meanwhile, did anybody happen to hear a piece on NPR the other day about some Christian weight-loss group’s vilification of fat, and obesity as a moral issue, etc? I can’t find it anywhere on the site now, or, indeed, on the entire World Wide Web, and I’m beginning to think I imagined the whole thing.

See, I was going to tie this all together with a big tirade on the bogus notion of health as a moral issue — how people are always yelling at you to quit smoking or quit eating or quit procrastinating when you should be packing or quit doing anything the doing of which is considered a moral failure, ostensibly out of their concern for your health, but in reality because “health,” in accordance with some convoluted Christian doctrine embedded in the cultural subconscious, has become a kind of yardstick by which conformity within the social order is measured, and how shaming people who are insufficiently obsessed with their cholesterol puts these concern trolls in a morally superior position and creates an underclass of “unhealthies” who have brought it on themselves through their blatant ingestion of Cheetos — but I’m too exhausted from all the delicious smoking. Let’s just say that if you ran into me at the coffeeshop and suggested that my self-indulgent punk rocker lifestyle caused my breast cancer, you wouldn’t be the first. The idea that you, through some assiduously applied, sanctimonious personal health program, can “prevent” cancer, or death, or whatever, and that such practices should win you higher status in your tribe, is a fucking load of crap.

__________________________

* A roadie is an extra-large can of cheap beer that all Texas quick shops stock on ice right next to the door, thus simplifying the important work of driving drunk.

As a spinster aunt whose monthly cancer drug bill could put a kid through Harvard, I always enjoy getting emails from people named Andrew at the National Boob Job Awareness Foundation who love my blog and are certain that my readers would equally love hearing about the Lap Dance For the Cure event or whatever. For every boner raised they’ll donate 10 cents to the Global Disease Awareness Educational Research Outreach Fund.

Why do I get the feeling that Andrew is not so avid a patriarchy-blamer as he suggests?

We have the Komen Foundation to thank for this crap. Ever since they figured out how to make people equate buying stuff with “curing” sentimental women’s diseases, doing-pointless-shit-for-the-cure is now America’s second-most-popular weekend activity. And Andrew, with his list of women bloggers, has job security for life.

Lately I’ve been getting spammed by some pretty persistent internet marketing flacks. They’re trying to leverage cervical cancer into big retail underwear bucks.

“Only one day left for Cancer Awareness Opportunity!” warns Andrew. Ah, if only I could believe that after tomorrow people wold stop trying to sell me more cancer awareness.

But this underwear thing, jayzus. Never has the commodification of fatal disease been so transparent. The pitch is something called “The Annual Undie Awards.” You log onto some site that sells underwear, input a bunch of information about the dimensions of your ass, and “vote” for your fave rave knickers. The retail underwear site will donate a quarter for every vote. They’ll also sell you your sexy animal-print thong after you vote for it.

“We all know someone who has been touched by this deadly disease,” eulogizes the sexy animal-print thong-marketing flack. “Please let your readers know about [the retail underwear site], and how their vote will also generate a contribution to this vital mission.”

Well, readers, now you know. Underwear, cervixes, voting. It’s “fun”!

Still, although cervixes are located down there, they aren’t quite as sexy as boobs, so I can appreciate that selling anything with this particular cancer is a tough slog. Here are the guys sitting around Starbucks, trying to figure out how to drive traffic to their site.

Underwearpreneur A: How about a Paris Hilton look-alike contest?

Underwearpreneur B: Dude, she doesn’t even wear underwear.

Underwearpreneur C: Hey. Let’s jump on that pink cancer bandwagon!

A: C’s right. You tell women how down you are with breast cancer and they throw cash at you AND go jogging in pink hot pants. Cha-ching!

B: Are you kidding me? We can’t afford breast cancer. Do you have any idea how much Komen charges for that logo?

C: Well, aren’t there some cheaper cancerous ladyparts?

A: Hymens?

B: Dude, hymens are too cheap.

A: Cervical cancer, then.

B: What is a cervix, anyway?

C: Nobody knows. That’s why we can get it for cheap.

B: I’ll text Andrew right now.

The underwear website is full of helpful pointers to assist women in navigating the mysterious and treacherous currents of feminine behavior. It’s not easy being a girl. Putting on a pair of underwear is apparently rocket science.

Step both legs into your panty, then pull it up until the waistband is at the desired location. Check and make sure your crotch is centered and pulled forward. Now, starting at the sides, run your fingers along and under the elastic of the leg openings towards the back to make sure the back panel is properly cupping your buttocks. Finally, run your fingers around the inside of the waistband to set it evenly at the waist.

Somebody actually got paid to write that.

________________________

Cervix photo link
Thong photo link

For those of you who follow my cancersploits and were wondering how my battery of scans from the other day turned out: a big old nugatory on all fronts.

I post this because I have noticed a marked tendency among the more melodramatically-inclined sector of the blametariat to speculate, in the absence of specific information to the contrary, that I am dead or dying.

Not yet, apparently.

Thanks to you all for your interest in my tumors and in my continued existence.

It is possible to avoid going to shopping malls. If you’re imprisoned by Fundamentalist Mormons in the middle of West Texas.

The other day, for no very interesting reason, I was hot-footin’ it through one of these whirling vortices of polyester lust when I happened upon the above-pictured wretched display of consumerist bogosity. Simon Property Group, which runs the Barton Square Creek Oaks Valley Spring Mall in question, is selling pink gift cards. They will pay Komen a buck for every gift card you buy.

This is why I hate Komen, and why I hate malls, and why I hate gift cards.

First, just don’t do it. Don’t give anyone a damn gift card. Unless you hate her. Nothing says “few things are more tedious than buying you a present” loudlier and clearlier than a gift card. I’d rather get light bulbs. AAA batteries. A ball of string. A bag of dirt. Seriously. When my sister got married I gave her a fly swatter and to this day she wipes a tear from her grateful eye when she says that it’s been more useful than all her other nuptial swag combined.

I hate Komen because they’ve brainwashed millions of people into believing that if they buy pink shit they are “making a difference.” Snap out of it! All you are doing is buying pink shit. Komen is a marketing facilitator. They do not reduce breast cancer occurence. They do not reduce breast cancer deaths. All they do is hook up sanctimonious shopaholics with corporate leeches who want to shine up their tarnished public images.

Such as mall owner Simon Property Group. It is not widely known that, before he was governor of New York and got collared for paying to rape women, then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed a lawsuit against Simon. So did Massachusetts and Connecticut. That’s right — it was a nefarious gift card con. You bought the gift card, but if the recipient didn’t use it within six months — and why would she? Wounded by your indifference, she tossed you lame-ass card into her desk drawer and forgot about it — Simon started charging “dormancy” fees. This was on top of the purchase fees, fees to check the balance, fees to transfer the balance to another card, fees to reissue lost or stolen cards, and “shipping and handling” fees if the card was used for online purchases. After 11 months, your dear, beloved friend’s crappy $25 Simon Mall gift card was whittled down to about 11 bucks, even if she never bought a single thing at the stupid mall.

And now I have to go and get shot up with radioactive waste so I can lie imprisoned in a tube at a nuclear medicine depot and get scanned for the goddam cancer that — surprise — 20 years of pink marketing failed to prevent.

I was mucking out the Twisty Archive of Abandoned Projects when I came across this funky and anomalous object. “Oh yeah,” I said. “That thing!”

It’s a self-portrait in cancerbroidery, incompleted a summer ago as I recuperated from, and felt compelled to represent in a medium with which I was entirely unfamiliar, assorted barbaric cancer cures. I’m no embroiderer, but I can attest to the therapeutic forces contained in wool thread.

I thought some of you crafty types might appreciate the vigor of its naivete.

Photo from TLC “The Life Lens” Documentary series.

It just shows to go ya, if you slap the word ’sexy’ on it, you can sell anything. Even “seemingly tragic” stage 4 cancer!

[Gracias, scrappyBadger]

Moonrise over the berry-flavored barium ’smoothie’.

UPDATE, JUNE 2: For those of you following my tiptoe through the garden of cancer, the scans were negative for metastases. One is tempted to hoist cups of wassail, but as it is only 10:30 in the morning, a shot of Patrón will suffice. A shout-out to the excellent Elsa, my oncologist’s nurse, for actually calling me on a Saturday so I wouldn’t have to spend the weekend pulling pins and needles out of my ass.