When I became a college history professor in 1968, a “new history” written “from the bottom up” was all the rage. Its manifesto proclaimed that henceforth history would concern itself with minorities, women, the working poor and all the other nonpowerful groups marginalized in history textbooks.
In my field of medical history, historians showed that medical care had been gendered. For example, women with tuberculosis were told by their physicians to passively accept their fate whereas men, if they could afford it, were encouraged to seek “travel cures.”
About the same time, women health care workers alleged that women with heart disease were not getting appropriate care because heart disease researchers mainly studied male subjects. Some feminists attributed this and other shortcomings in the medical treatment of women to sexism and the all-powerful patriarchy. In the book, “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” they declared that male misogyny had kept women in ignorance about their bodies in order to keep women subservient to men.
I began to think about these things last year after receiving a diagnosis of early stage prostate cancer. I was struck by the fact that while prostate cancer and breast cancer are comparable in many ways, they have evoked very different societal responses. Consider this. The pink ribbon is universally recognized as the symbol of breast cancer advocacy, but how many persons know what color signifies prostate cancer? (It is blue.) And yet the morbidity and mortality rates for the diseases are very similar. In 2010, breast and prostate cancer are estimated to claim the lives of 39,840 women and 32,050 men, respectively. Men have a 1 in 6 lifetime risk of developing prostate cancer, while for women the odds of getting breast cancer are 1 in 8.
Where the diseases are most alike, I believe, is the threat they pose to men’s masculinity and women’s femininity. This is because the treatments for these diseases frequently leave women disfigured and men impotent and incontinent.
Hardly a month goes by when my wife does not receive a solicitation from Susan G. Komen for the Cure. In its 17 years of existence, Komen says it has raised more than $1.3 billion. The fund-raising efforts of organizations that have been established to fight prostate cancer pale by comparison. In their book, “Cancer Activism: Gender, Media and Public Policy,” Karen Kedrowski and Marilyn Sarow observe that in Congress “Women — breast cancer survivors — wield the power [while] ... men — prostate cancer survivors — struggle to raise public awareness of the disease and struggle to keep it on the agenda.” They add that when it comes to both media coverage and government spending, breast cancer advocates are “miles ahead” of their male counterparts.
Women have been more successful in advocating for their medical causes because men are socialized to suffer in silence. In the battle of the sexes, women complain that men are emotionally unavailable, prompting men to retort that women talk and men do.
Men are more likely to speak in order to exchange information whereas women converse in order to sustain social relationships. I am inclined to say “vive la difference,” for it certainly makes life more interesting, both at work and at home, to be exposed to persons who think and act differently than you do. Cancer, however, is too serious a subject to be flippant about, and we men must acknowledge that when it comes to medical advocacy, men have a lot to learn from women.
Stuart Galishoff of Sandy Springs is a participant in the Johns Hopkins Active Surveillance Program for early stage, nonaggressive prostate cancer.
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