Welcome to the Women's Movement 2.0

[ensho]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175171/


Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, Welcome to the Women's Movement 2.0

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No group with a major stake in health-care reform has seen as many peaks and valleys this year as women's health activists. After pressuring lawmakers and rolling out initiatives like the "Being a Woman Is Not a Pre-Existing Condition" campaign, they scored three significant victories when the House of Representatives released its health bill in late October. The draft legislation included language that would eliminate the discriminatory practice of "gender rating," block companies from deeming C-sections and domestic violence "pre-existing conditions," and require employers to pay for maternity care.

A week later, that momentum came to a screeching halt when Congressman Bart Stupak's amendment to ban federal funding for most abortions, on public and private insurance plans alike, landed in the House's legislation. Democratic leaders called the eleventh-hour amendment a necessary political compromise. Women's health advocates decried the move, and blasted legislators for caving in and dealing a heavy blow to the most contested of reproductive rights. While the public debate over Stupak's amendment continues, another behind-the-scenes struggle is underway over coverage for crucial preventive health services for women, including basic gynecological "well visits," for which funding was dropped in the Senate's comprehensive health bill. Early victories notwithstanding, women's health advocates have their work cut out for them as health-care reform heads into the next round in Congress.
-snip-
****


Not So Pretty in Pink
The Uproar Over New Breast Cancer Screening Guidelines



Has feminism been replaced by the pink-ribbon breast cancer cult? When the House of Representatives passed the Stupak amendment, which would take abortion rights away even from women who have private insurance, the female response ranged from muted to inaudible.

A few weeks later, when the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended that regular screening mammography not start until age 50, all hell broke loose. Sheryl Crow, Whoopi Goldberg, and Olivia Newton-John raised their voices in protest; a few dozen non-boldface women picketed the Department of Health and Human Services. If you didn’t look too closely, it almost seemed as if the women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s had returned in full force.

Never mind that Dr. Susan Love, author of what the New York Times dubbed “the bible for women with breast cancer,” endorses the new guidelines along with leading women’s health groups like Breast Cancer Action, the National Breast Cancer Coalition, and the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN). For years, these groups have been warning about the excessive use of screening mammography in the U.S., which carries its own dangers and leads to no detectible lowering of breast cancer mortality relative to less mammogram-happy nations.

Nonetheless, on CNN last week, we had the unsettling spectacle of NWHN director and noted women’s health advocate Cindy Pearson speaking out for the new guidelines, while ordinary women lined up to attribute their survival from the disease to mammography. Once upon a time, grassroots women challenged the establishment by figuratively burning their bras. Now, in some masochistic perversion of feminism, they are raising their voices to yell, “Squeeze our tits!”

When the Stupak anti-choice amendment passed, and so entered the health reform bill, no congressional representative stood up on the floor of the House to recount how access to abortion had saved her life or her family’s well-being. And where were the tea-baggers when we needed them? If anything represents the true danger of “government involvement” in health care, it’s a health reform bill that – if the Senate enacts something similar -- will snatch away all but the wealthiest women’s right to choose.

It’s not just that abortion is deemed a morally trickier issue than mammography. To some extent, pink-ribbon culture has replaced feminism as a focus of female identity and solidarity. When a corporation wants to signal that it’s “woman friendly,” what does it do? It stamps a pink ribbon on its widget and proclaims that some miniscule portion of the profits will go to breast cancer research. I’ve even seen a bottle of Shiraz called “Hope” with a pink ribbon on its label, but no information, alas, on how much you have to drink to achieve the promised effect. When Laura Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2007, what grave issue did she take up with the locals? Not women’s rights (to drive, to go outside without a man, etc.), but “breast cancer awareness.” In the post-feminist United States, issues like rape, domestic violence, and unwanted pregnancy seem to be too edgy for much public discussion, but breast cancer is all apple pie.

So welcome to the Women’s Movement 2.0: Instead of the proud female symbol -- a circle on top of a cross -- we have a droopy ribbon. Instead of embracing the full spectrum of human colors -- black, brown, red, yellow, and white -- we stick to princess pink. While we used to march in protest against sexist laws and practices, now we race or walk “for the cure.” And while we once sought full “consciousness” of all that oppresses us, now we’re content to achieve “awareness,” which has come to mean one thing -- dutifully baring our breasts for the annual mammogram.
-snip-
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read on, get educated

think!

[Luminous Animal]

1. Kick.

[ensho]

2. kick

nt

[dusmcj]

3. time to raise hell. who knows, maybe we'll start advocating for sexual freedom again too

but that would be cause for the institution of martial law, so let's keep it hush-hush like we always have.

Yes, it's time.

[liberal_at_heart]

4. As someone who is deeply affected by breast cancer I agree with you

Breast cancer is not the only women's issue. It is one, but not the only one. We should be fighting for all of women's rights not just the right to get a mammogram. I am very upset that so many democratic politicians are willing to throw women's rights under the bus just so they can claim a victory on healthcare. A victory that includes compromising on women's health and compromising on a public option is no victory at all in my book.

[niyad]

5. k and r

[ismnotwasm]

6. As Wanda Sykes commented

"A man has never had to walk a mile for his Balls"

I care for many post-cancer breast reconstruction patients. I don't mind the pink itself so much, as I do the industry behind it. Women their breasts and their suffering used by company after company as product endorsements. Why more women aren't marching in force to keep their reproductive rights intact is interesting. And terrifying.


I don't agree with the new mammogram guidelines. Here's another another viewpoint, from a feminist blogger;


"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?"

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2009/11/19/american-boobs-used-as-political-football-part-472/

Many of the I women I care for women are in their 30's or 40's, young, healthy appearing. By the time we see them, they've been though the chemo, the radiation, the spacers. They've opted to have a breast or both breasts replaced. (On my unit, usually by a type of surgery, called a DIEP) While the emotional impact of losing their breast(s) varies from woman to woman, what we often lose sight of is the diagnoses of cancer itself. What it does on the deeper emotional levels.

Not too many of them have a lot of pink around.

[niyad]

12. my dearest friend, also a DU member, got cancer at 43-- found, don't you know, through one of

those nasty self-exams. she survived eleven years, had both breasts removed, and didn't have a lot of pink around, either.

those "guidelines" just blew me away.

[niyad]

13. thank you, by the way, for that blog site--have it bookmarked.

[Hidden Stillness]

7. Male Media is "Running" Feminism Now

This is all part of the larger issue of the male media and all other institutions co-opting and stealing the entire public discussion of "women's" issues. I knew, during the 1990s, when I read a newspaper on "feminist women's" attempts to be "free" in Iran at that time, written by a male, and it was completely about "wearing makeup" and "going on dates," no actual content, I knew then that they had changed their tactics, and rather than censor everything or attack every time, they were going to tell the story themselves, and take it away from us. Now we have nothing but abortion and breast cancer, because it is all right with males.

Notice that they never covered how angry women were at the male media's sexist, hateful treatment of Hillary Clinton, infuriating even those who didn't support her. Never cover the underpayment, overwork, and lack of pensions, benefits, raises or promotions of the vast majority of women; never cover violence and abuse against women, the increasing vulgar hate of the commercial male "culture."

Again, recently when Tiger Woods cheats over and over and the woman is finally sick of it, they all told it--WITH NO EVIDENCE AT ALL--as the woman "attacking Woods" with a golf club (!!), an accusation so ridiculous that I waited and waited for WHO was giving this "evidence." It was NO ONE. Thread after thread from the "highly respected insiders" at DU, attacking the white woman, attacking women for not attacking her, believing the most vicious slander, with no evidence! This is always scary, they still do it every time--I assume none of the myriads on DU have apologized--and they will do it again next time, too, as when women report rape or battering. The "liberal" bigots always, still, believe the worst about women.

So now they have co-opted this, to the exclusion of everything women care about and know, and now they slant every God-damned thing. The ordinary old difference of opinion on whether Mammograms are recommended too often for every group, and should only be more often for high-risk groups and self-exams the first-choice practice for all others, as the task force sensibly recommends, now becomes a trumped-up "male against male warfare" to obscure and co-opt everything, again. For all the "coverage" on breast cancer, they manage not to even cover what scams most of the "cancer foundations/pink ribbon things" even are. I wonder why...

It used to be that women could not get the word out because male media angrily killed all the stories we tried to tell; now, they just make up shit themselves, and pretend the subject is not censored.

[hayu_lol]

8. Seems to be criminal to me...that women need to fight...

the same identical battles over and over again about every 25/30 years. Suffrage was settled law. R v W was settled law. Property rights was settled law. The entire package comes under the same attacks that happened the first time around.

Dunno the answer. There has to be a better way to settle these issues.

[Hidden Stillness]

10. A Great Point--There are Always Enemies Waiting to Undo What You Just Did

This post reminds me of something that probably pissed off a lot of people recently, and that was the way Repr. Bart Stupak went around to several TV media, and gloated that "we won fair and square" when they suddenly passed the attack on abortion availability in the House, attached to the "health" (corporate insurance) bill. "We won it on a vote and now they want to do it over again" "they lost and we won," etc., etc. What is so disgusting is what you just mentioned--WE won these things, fair and square, "permanently" during the 1970s and before and after. Then, as soon as it was done, little by little--Hyde Amendment, etc., etc., now to this Stupak Amend.--they started chipping away at it, as if we did not win it "fair and square" "on a fair vote" after all, because here they are, led by Stupak, and suddenly "because they lost, they want to do it all over." The very accusation they now make, is what they themselves did to us, to get here. Taking away everything we fought for and earned. The scary part is how many enemies this exposed--if it had been Stupak and a few Republican nuts (keeping in mind only two Democratic women voted for the Stupak Amend.), then it never would have come anywhere near passing.

[niyad]

14. wish I could rec' an individual post. this certainly deserves it--perhaps you could

do it as a separate thread? the issue you brought up needs to be brought to everyone's attention.

[Hidden Stillness]

17. About This Frustrating Issue...

This is such a frustrating issue to think about; it pisses me off just to think of it at all. This has become the central roadblock stopping what was a gradual march of progress, because now, nothing gets out, no advocacy, no answers to false claims, no protest, no alternative tellings of things--nothing--the way women/feminists would tell it. Everything now becomes a dead-end, because they stop it. It reminds me also of the time during the 1980s when the male media, as part of their "re-education camp," started pushing the singer Madonna, of all stupid examples, as an example of "the new" (if you will remember) "feminism," "the new" "strong" woman; that is, any woman who got up off the ground was a scary, "strong" woman. They started the slander against "old" (that is, real) feminism then, as if male-oriented consumerism had now replaced it, and that has been the attitude since. That is, when they mention it at all.

Several years ago, the March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C. drew a crowd estimated officially at almost one million people; it was actually called the single largest gathering of any kind there. There was NO media coverage of any kind--NONE. There was no coverage of anyone outraged by the total lack of coverage. It was now complete. They tell everything their way; they erase all others.

Makeup,dating, pornography, abortion, hate Palin, "fuck the missing white bitch," over and over, the same round, told by the same males, who still think of the world as male racial groups, black males and white males only. Feminism itself is not even conducted the same exciting and wonderful, thought-provoking way it was during the golden era when it seemed we were going to make progress, during the 1970s, (the latest big wave). Where are our actual issues, challenges, where are the consciousness-raising sessions that were so perceptive and, dare I say it, liberating? Where are the women? Now, EVERYTHING is "under control" corporate male slogan campaign and thought-control or censorship. The only time the male media refers to feminism at all today, is to laugh and sneer, or lecture against it. You can't get on the once-public airwaves, yet where else is there to go to reach the actual general audience, (and computers will not do it)?

[ensho]

18. true

nt

[Robyn66]

9. I screamed about the mammogram thing the first time so I am not going there again

Only one thing. I HATE that they are using the PINK thing to categorize women who are breast cancer survivors. The pink thing is a marketing ploy no more no less. It may have started out as something different but you will find (and I was surprised to find) most breast cancer patients and survivors HATE PINK RIBBONS!

That being said. I believe the no mammograms until 50 by a panel with three insurance execs and no oncologists is going to prove to have faulty science to say the least. We will probably see the death rate start to rise in about 10 years. I know for a fact the cancer I was diagnosed with at 42 would have been terminal if I had waited until 50 for my first mammogram. The cancer I had was caught on the baseline.

If the amendment passed by congress today stands, women will have access to mammograms, hopefully better cancer detection methods will be developed soon as well. But women's medical health is certainly not only about cancer.

It was not all that long ago that I remember hearing about a woman who wanted to get her tubes tied needing to get her husband's permission first. We need to have our rights to our bodies protected and those rights need to be supported by our legislators. We as women do need to take to the streets for women to have the right to have complete control of their bodies. They have a right to choose and a right to a mammogram. They have a right to not have a mammogram too. And they should have a choice to have an ultrasound INSTEAD of a mammogram if they prefer. I don't know why they don't send you there first. That is where you go after you get a "troubling" mammogram anyway. It is less uncomfortable and some say more accurate. But anyway, we need to get out there because no one is going out of their way to represent our rights. If the mammogram controversy has taught us anything, its if we make an uproar things can happen.

[niyad]

11. ...

[ensho]

15. kick

nt

[niyad]

16. ....

[ismnotwasm]

19. It's a great topic

And it deserves a kick