Women's Hour: Why are they so certain of the 'success' of breast cancer awareness?

This week i-ve been on i-player. There's a piece on Women’s Hour about cancer awareness campaigns.  Women’s Hour on 9 February 2012 (chapter two) featured a piece on breast cancer campaigning and what men’s health campaigners could learn from it. Inevitably, the prostate cancer lobby, as personified by the CEO of The Prostate Cancer Charity, was the pupil.

Anyone tootling round my posts knows, or will shortly find out, that I think cancer charities’ styling of cancer awareness is bonkers.

Anyone soon tootling around on i-player to see what I'm on about, should note that at no point was the drive to fundraising by pink ribbonry mentioned. That is an undoubled success but we should question what effects the muddle of money raised with messages delivered has on all women's health.  

In addition, the model of women’s health that the breast cancer lobby espouse is quite probably bad for women. Therefore it will come as no surprise that thinking that the prostate cancer lobby must simply emulate the breast cancer lobby is bad, for men.

The contributors were Jenni Murray, the lovely presenter, Dr.Elizabeth Toon, the interesting academic from Manchester and Owen Sharp, the CEO of The Prostate Cancer Charity, lumbered with the impossibility of communicating pithily on the most counter intuitive, nuanced and contradictory of cancers. They all glided along in a discussion framed with reference to the ‘successful’ campaigns on behalf of breast cancer, and the ‘success of the pink ribbon’.

Successful? Tch. Well, no. High profile? Yes. But successful? hmmm….

It’s not a  success in awareness raising if older women, at increasing risk of breast cancer because of their increasing age, have no idea of this. They think it’s a cancer of younger women. As older women aren’t news, or a decent ‘hook’ in any media or fashion led campaign, the awareness lobbies don’t use them either. Fashion targets breast cancer, remember…..and we all know how fashion regards older women. If the breast cancer lobby actively  campaigned about older women and their experiences of breast cancer, I’d think ‘success’, related to challenging and changing society’s attitudes to all women, all experiences of breast cancer, regardless of a women’s age or youthful appearance.

I appreciated Dr Toon’s analysis of the 'Kylie' effect in media coverage of Ms. Minogue’s breast cancer experience.  The media ruminated on women’s place in the world, career, fertility and leaving child birth too late. This absolutely reflected the blind eye to older women that the media have always turned. It might be changing, slowly, but it’ll be a flamin’ long time ‘til the media work out how on earth to articulate the simple truth ‘older women have breasts and more of them get breast cancer’. 

I think the awareness lobby should be much more assertive and radical on this. It's all a bit predictable and stereotyped now.  

Successful?

It’s not a success in awareness raising if three times as many women die of heart disease as die of breast cancer and no women I’ve ever met has any idea. The stereotype puts men and heart diesase together in the public mind. As 38,000 women die of coronary heart disease annually (v. 12,000 of breast cancer) and women don't know and will almost certainly fear breast cancer much more I hope you can see why I do question the notion of success of the glibly gendered health messages of breast cancer campaigns.  

We need some women's health campaigns - and some idea that women's health is found in other things beyond their lady parts.  

That might help the 20 odd thousand women with end stage respiratory failure who die, invisibly, every year. 

Successful?

It’s not a  success in awareness raising if women with secondary breast cancer don’t appear in awareness campaigns. They may prefer a more private battle, so it could be best that they are granted that privacy. But why are they excluded? Is it wrong if they are struggling along, isolated, old or failing to match the approach of the truly remarkable Jane Tomlinson, famously and heroically running her secondary breast cancer as a marathon. Where are the more prosaic women; the strugglers, worriers, shouters, storytellers, fighters, survivors and tusslers, the brave, the fearful, the anxious, the smiling, the overcome?

Successful campaign on women’s health?

It’s not a  success in awareness raising if the constant messages on breast cancer as a serious health problem for women bleeds slowly into a subtly different one  - that it is the only serious problem for women. How should women consider the experiences of the other 96% of women, who will die of something else?

I am unclear what exactly the concentration on breast cancer has done for promoting all women’s health, for all women, especially for the women who get deeply ‘unsexy’ non-gender specific diseases [I do know a small number of men get breast cancer] Until women can share progress across all women’s health, the success of the breast cancer lobby is partial and hollow. There really is no space for self congratulation. It isn’t a great model of success from which to teach others, the success steeped, as it is, in both ageist and sexist undercurrents.

Successful?

The lobby has worked ‘best’ for women with breast cancer, not women full stop. And 12,000 women a year still die from it. I absolutely see more needs to be done but in a different and better way. Remember Thatcher? She was accused of being a women who, having got across the moat, pulled up the drawbridge behind her. There must be a better way of articulating women’s health in the public sphere which permits a space alongside breast cancer to include a wider, more complicated range of women, and their health issues whether women specific or not.

Women with bowel cancer or lung cancer won’t have been greatly helped by the dominant culture of breast cancer. They may have been disadvantaged by getting an ‘anybody’s’ cancer, not a proper women’s cancer. It’s not rocket science to package ‘men only’ and ‘women only’ cancers and sell them back to us. Their profound resonance with each gender is not the same as their significance, but the lobbies would have us believe they are.   

And so, on to the unfortunate Owen Sharp and prostate cancer.  Next post……