Friday, 6 February 2009

For the boys

Obviously it's important to campaign to raise awareness of male cancers too.
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3 comments:

Dave H said...

(I notice you have another post dealing with a specific case of cancer, for which the below flippancy looks horribly insensitive. In fact this whole comment now looks off-colour, which for once was unintentional. I was just setting down the mixture of dark and humorous feelings I had on seeing some posters. Maybe I should just stick to the usual abuse)

There were health awareness posters on this in the Gents at work a few years ago. Apparently the commonest cancer in men under thirty is testicular.

Baffingly, they said if it was caught early it was 'easily cured.'

My feeling at the time was that had to have been written by a woman (I later found out I was right). It isn’t difficult to imagine what the 'cure' is, and just how easy that would be for a man, especially one under thirty.

I tried gender-translating this to calculate the equivalent loss for a female, and of course it’s pretty much impossible. Both sexes retain essential functionality with just one, so rationally, a single masectomy would be a greater trauma purely because of the greater change in external appearance. I mean, to be frank, modifications to the appearance of something that in the first place resembles a small hairy brain are quite outwith aesthetic considerations, whatever else they mean.

So to lose one ought to be a lesser misfortune for a male. But to lose both? ...that’s the whole shooting match, say oophorectomy plus single masectomy. Welcome to sterile, impotent flabby docility. There is no female eunuch. It’s better than the alternative of a slow death of course, but not easy. But heck, for whom is cancer easy? It’s a word best avoided in this context.

Finally, in lack of self-awareness only rivalled by signs outside recently cleaned Gents saying ‘Caution Wet Floor’, the posters advised that men should self-examine regularly. Look, that’s just medical justification for a yucky habit we had anyway.

Sat Feb 07, 12:04:00 pm
Dave H said...

"Shoesmith puts boot into malignant Balls"

Normal service resumed.

Sat Feb 07, 12:12:00 pm
Kerry said...

I don't claim to be an expert on such things but I don't think it would render someone impotent, would it? Sterile, yes.

Sat Feb 07, 04:52:00 pm

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