Seeking Justice vs Letting Go, In Three Acts. Act #2: Ain't Cancer Grand?

In 2000, at age 59, Barbara Ehrenreich (of Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch fame), found herself diagnosed with breast cancer. She recounts her story in Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, but you can read the full story in Harper's or in the Guardian.

Her journey leads her to entertaining and depressing insights about the ultra-feminine nature of the Breast Cancer industry -- and it is an industry:

"Awareness" beats secrecy and stigma of course, but I can't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend has earnestly advised me to "confront [my] mortality" bears a striking resemblance to the mall.

More germane to our subject is how her new culture (or, as she describes it, the "pink-ribbon breast cancer cult") infantilizes women:

Possibly the idea is that regression to a state of childlike dependency puts one in the best frame of mind with which to endure the prolonged and toxic treatments. Or it may be that, in some versions of the prevailing gender ideology, femininity is by its nature incompatible with full adulthood -- a state of arrested development. Certainly men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars.

And, directly related to the paradox at hand, the tension between living happily with one's disease, and questioning its cause and its treatment:

In the mainstream of breast-cancer culture, one finds very little anger, no mention of possible environmental causes, few complaints about the fact that, in all but the more advanced, metastasized cases, it is the "treatments," not the disease, that cause illness and pain . . .

The Breast Friends website, for example, features a series of inspirational quotes: "Don't Cry Over Anything that Can't Cry Over You," "I Can't Stop the Birds of Sorrow from Circling my Head, But I Can Stop Them from Building a Nest in My Hair," 'When Life Hands Out Lemons, Squeeze Out a Smile," "Don't wait for your ship to come in . . . Swim out to meet it," and much more of that ilk.

My love of quotations notwithstanding, I'm probably going a little overboard here, so I'll skip right to her well-supported, well-argued conclusion:

In the harshest judgment, the breast-cancer cult serves as an accomplice in global poisoning -- normalizing cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it, perversely, as a positive and enviable experience.

It is possibly true that if Barbara had embraced the pink ribbons and the teddy bears, the vapid sayings and the story that others were trying to impose upon her, she might have been happier.

But it is also true that for every woman that questions whether the pain of chemotherapy is worth it, given the dismal increase in 5-year survival rates, questions how bad science led to recommendations that increased breast cancer risk, questions the Cancer-Industrial Complex (companies that both make and promote carcinogens, and create treatments for cancers) -- well, for every woman that fights the system, fights back against the "pink-ribbon cult," the chance drops a bit that another woman will be forced to suffer what she is suffering through.


I will give Barbara the last word.

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a "gift", was a very personal, agonising encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before – one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate.