October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, although more awareness hardly seems necessary. After all, even football players are sporting pink on their uniforms to show their awareness. Some players are even wearing pink shoes.
Angelina Jolie’s breast cancer awareness
Women usually get double mastectomies to treat breast cancer. But Angelina Jolie has everyone talking about women getting double mastectomies to prevent it.
That’s because many of these women seem to be using the fear of breast cancer as a pretext for getting boob jobs. Oncologists are referring to this as “the Angelina effect.”
Indeed, the media are hailing Jolie as the patron saint of breast cancer survivors without any hint of irony. Again, she never had breast cancer.
She was diagnosed with the BRCA gene, predisposing her to get it. Yet even TIME magazine bared her decision to have an elective double mastectomy on its May 27, 2013, cover.
But I had already pooh-poohed this beatification in “Angelina Jolie’s ‘Heroic Decision’ to Get Breast Implants…?” on May 16, 2013. After all, no matter how reasonable her fear of getting breast cancer was, she had a double mastectomy to get a boob job.
Unsurprisingly, that blog post incited lots of hate mail. But none of it addressed the superficial regard far too many women now have for this radical surgery:
We’re seeing a large number of women requesting a preventive mastectomy for peace of mind, women who’ve been diagnosed but don’t have a genetic predisposition so wouldn’t benefit. These are patients who say, ‘Can you do for me what Angelina Jolie had done?’ They’re on the increase.
That was Professor Kefah Mokbel of the London Breast Institute, as quoted in an October 3, 2013 report in the New York Post. The takeaway from this report is that women are getting double mastectomies for ” some “peace of mind.” However, I posit that their motives lie in vanity, believing that:
It’s better to look good than to feel good.
Moreover, they’ll be looking to be complimented after surgery with:
You look mahvalous!
(With apologies to actor Billy Crystal who made these two lines famous with his parody of Fernando Lamas on Saturday Night Live during the mid-1980s.)
The triumph of vanity over science
In any event, the University of Minnesota vindicated my cynicism. Because it presented a research paper at the 2013 Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons, which found that:
Women who have a healthy breast removed over fears they might later develop breast cancer may not improve their survival rate, according to new research.
(Daily Mail, October 7, 2013)
That research also found that women with the BRCA gene who get prophylactic double mastectomies improve their life expectancy by no more than six months. Which raises the question: If, like Jolie, you had the BRCA gene but no trace of breast cancer, would you opt for a double mastectomy too?
Meanwhile, it must have been some boob, with silicone implants for brains, who called for a “No Bra Day” this Sunday, October 13. After all, most women I know have natural breasts and go to church on Sundays. Besides, none of them would be caught dead on a nude beach with their girls jiggling like two mounds of breast-plated jello.
On the other hand, this clarion call betrays the imposing conceit of women with fake boobs. That’s why they have no compunction about their bra-less breasts delivering a more important message than the word of God.
Finally, the National Institutes of Health estimates that 300,000 people in the United States die of obesity each year. According to NIH estimates, that is more than five times the number of those who die from breast cancer (40,000) and ovarian cancer (15,000) combined.
Yet, strangely, TIME magazine has overlooked the “Roker effect .” That is, to highlight the alarming number of people rushing out to get gastric bypass surgery after NBC’s popular weatherman Al Roker publicized his. Ergo, with homage to Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
[Vanity], thy name is woman!