Jill, formerly Twisty, of I Blame The Patriarchy, herself a double-mastectomy survivor, reflects on an intrinsic bias towards treatment over prevention for many types of illness — breast cancer in her case.

Specifically Jill was responding to the lack of online information, particularly photographic information, about mastectomy and aftercare compared to, say, enough images of pink ribbons and pink soda-bottle packaging to repave Los Angeles.

As Samantha King writes in the enlightening Pink Ribbons, Inc.:

[Women] are discouraged from questioning the underlying structures and guiding assumptions of the cancer-industrial complex. The culture of breast cancer survivorship does not, in other words, embrace patient-empowerment as a way to mobilize critical engagement with biomedical research, anger at governmental inactionk or resistance to social discrimination and inequality, even if its history is bound up with attempts to do just this.”

People can’t find out how really fucking gross treatment is, because if they did they might start thinking, hey, maybe preventing breast cancer — as opposed to waiting for women to get sick and then slamming them with a series of debilitating, barbaric procedures — is a good idea.

She said it here.

One needn’t agree that there’s a purposeful conspiracy to get the point that there’s not as much emphasis placed on finding ways to prevent common illnesses like breast cancer as there is for “the cure” after they’re diagnosed. Nor does one need to think the emphasis on treatment boils down to profit motive to agree more emphasis could be put on prevention.

Part of the problem, of course, at least in America, is that we’re great optimists and (Katrina notwithstanding) pretty good at responding to immediate catastrophe. And so we have a hard time in general with anticipation: “you won’t get cancer if you…” when you don’t have it (yet) is just way harder to gear up for compared to how we’re able to marshall ourselves in the face of “you have cancer…” (What’s that line “nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of being hanged in the morning?)

But I digress. I just want to echo Jill’s point that when one is facing a crisis like prospective surgery and chemotherapy (of any sort) it would be awfully nice if there was as much information available about what to expect before and during the process as well as there is for after.

Oh, one last thing: this, I think, is one of those areas where blogging really shines. It’s sometimes heartwrenching to read someone’s personal experience with surgery, recovery, chemo, remission, reoccurrence. But it’s very good to know. Just as its good to know what to expect before our first kiss, our first orgasm, our first time driving, our first child, or job, and so on, it’s good to know what to expect when we fall ill. Again, that’s where people who blog have shined.

So thanks to a comment a few days ago on this post where I quoted Karen Forsythe’s point that intercourse is only one of several options I learned about a cool-concept blog, Feminists with Female Sexual Dysfunction. From the “About” page

Welcome to Feminists with FSD, a blog written by, for, and from the perspective of feminists with female sexual dysfunction.

This project began as after this blogger, a self-identifying feminist with vulvodynia, became fed up with the available information about FSD from a feminist perspective! There are relatively few discussions about this topic on the internet, despite the fact that up to 43% of women experience some form of FSD during thier lifetime according to the American Medical Association – and that’s just in the US! I found that what little material there is, while well-meaning, is all too often misinformed or jumps to distressing (or even outright wrong) conclusions.

This blog’s mission statement is: To provide women with FSD, and their partners, a voice on the internet where we can discuss how feminism influences our views of sex, and how our sexuality influence our views of feminism.

Read the quote in context here.

The intro says a lot, but it skirts the point: vulvodynia, vaginismus, vestibulitis, interstitial cystitis, and other conditions of the pelvic floor makes penis-in-vagina extremely painful. And consequently treatment tends to revolve around making it less painful. Or, ideally, not painful at all, but it’s considered progress if treatment only reduces how painful it is.

That’s a pretty androcentric outlook. And if we didn’t have feminism we could just leave it at that and be done — less painful good, more painful bad. And if we had only Rush Limbaugh and maybe Twisty Faster’s also-androcentric vision of political-lesbian “rad-fem” the answer would be nearly as clear cut: intercourse is bad for women anyway so just don’t have PIV intercourse. (Actually see the author’s nuanced take on Twisty’s ideas about it here.)

But in fact androcentrism isn’t the most helpful approach. The biggest one being that the pain often extends beyond PIV penetration to any kind of touch at all. Including wearing clothes, sitting down, walking, etc. The other being that even when the context is sex and even when the desired outcome involves contact, insertion, and intercourse it doesn’t have to have anything to do with the convenience of men.

Shocking I know. But all the more reason to examine it from the perspective of those who actually have it instead of their partners or random pundits and passers by.