Check your chest breast cancer awareness/charity.

[LostMyPantsAtGatwickAirport]

I keep hearing adverts from a charity (Coppafeel) about checking your chest - not breasts - and it amazes me how happy women are to see off our language and anatomy and allow inclusion to basically write us out of an issue that mainly affects us.

I know men can also get breast cancer, but it’s in breast tissue, so using breast is entirely clear and anatomically correct.

On the same radio station I’ve heard adverts aimed at men to have their prostate checked - not once is this information muddied at all by falling over backwards to be inclusive to a small minority.

I thought we were heading out of this abysmal wasteland, but apparently not.

I have complained, but blah blah blah inclusion, kindness etc.

I'll be doing that later, because they all want to know why I was asking. I'm currently surveying whether they know where the pectorals are. I want to know whether they think of the muscle, or whether they think of the flesh on the torso above that muscle. Not sure where this is going to go.

I have absolutely no idea how you've even managed to twist yourself into the knot of arguing that this somehow means they're saying that only women get breast cancer,

No, that is not what I have said (although I understand that it would be easier for you to address that argument).

I have said that their avoidant messaging endorses the idea that there is stigma when a man gets breast cancer because it means he isn't masculine.

Breast cancer is a specific disease that, at least before it has reached stage 4, doesn't randomly affect your upper body area.

It seems as though you are more used to talking to people who understand their identity in terms of masculinity and femininity, and the world has all sorts of people who believe different things and we all have to rub along together.

However, general medical advice should be clear and accurate.

If there are any casual readers reading this thread, and you're on the fence, please, please take 10 seconds to look at the Coppafeel website. It's at https://coppafeel.org/

The words 'Breast Cancer' are plastered everywhere. In the masthead. In the main text on the front page. The colour scheme is pink. No english-speaking person, not even for a moment, could doubt what they're reading about.

Now ask yourselves whether this is about genuine concern around clear language use. Or whether it's yet another case of just shitting on trans people. On this occasion, trans people with cancer.

It's fucking despicable. It's off the scale.

By one measure, I'm gender critical. I don't think people can change sex, I think some of the TRA behaviour is horrible, I think the policing of language (by either party) is not cool.

But this thread tells you everything you need to know about some posters on this board and this website.

I think the idea is that you give them all the advice about pecs and chests, and then you say it's advice from a breast cancer charity and they say 'Oh, so why didn't you talk about breasts in the first place?'.

That is apparently how medical advice works these days.

No. It's about not shitting on anyone by telling them that breasts are a sign of femininity and chests and pecs are a sign of masculinity.

I think your perspective is very blinkered.

Glad to hear your views.

And I think you're motivated by blind hatred. Cancer sufferers ffs.

Can we agree to disagree?

I think from reading the posts before yours that you may have misunderstood what vitriol means. Don't worry - it's a common mistake nowadays. I think it's a bit of a dumbed-down social media, playgroundy thing - something like, people think it's far more exciting and validating to use a big scary word like that, and others follow suit without looking it up.

Anyway, worth highlighting so you can avoid this in future. It looks silly and, most importantly, means the word no longer has its power when it's really needed - and that's no good at all when we all want to be able to distinguish between sometimes upsetting but important debate, like this, and the extremes of intentional, sadistic cruelty we see levelled at trans people and other vulnerable groups in other contexts.

If everything's vitriol, you're suddenly helpless when you need to name the real deal.

Can I have tomorrow night's lottery numbers as well?

Whereas I am inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you just haven't thought this through.

it's my extensive experience of cancer that makes me believe so strongly in the importance of clear language that doesn't imply a value judgement.

How is that keeping everyone safe? It's doing precisely the opposite. If someone told me to check my chest I wouldn't have a clue what they meant. If they told me to check my breasts I know instantly what they mean. It's breast cancer not chest cancer. And that applies to men and women alike. It's not called chest cancer in men, it's called breast cancer because it's in the breast tissue not in the 'chest' whatever that means.

Had a look, almost exactly 10 seconds. Agree with OP.

The lack of clarity about who is most likely to be vulnerable to this is striking. I couldn't see any references to females, girls or women as being significantly more at risk, and did, contrastingly, see the emphatic and explicit "any body" at the bottom reinforcing the overall impression that there is no sex-based difference here.

Duly googled, thinking that the presentation of website must therefore indicate a far higher prevalence in males, boys and men than I'd previously thought. Didn't spend long on that either, admittedly, but the below was representative.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2815713/

Females, women and girls are massively, massively, more at risk, and the website doesn't make this clear.

It's pretty simple, really. It's (obviously - I mean, duh!) important that these campaigns are carefully targetted to reach as many of those likely to benefit from them as humanly possible. Think, like, different ages, varied levels of intelligence, different reading abilities, people with English as a second language, quick skim-readers, casual radio listeners busy channel-hopping etc. etc. etc.

The implications of compromising the number of females/women/girls getting the message (99+++% of sufferers) so as to include the tiny minority that are transmen, as opposed to taking a more egalitarian and proportionate approach to include transmen while not disadvantaging the larger group (eg. additive language) are striking and concerning.

To attribute concern about this to "blind hatred" is, frankly, utterly irrational. This, coupled with the starkness of the language you use (not a bad example of what vitriolic actually means, frankly) suggest you may not be thinking entirely clearly about this.

Sorry, are you seriously arguing that people don't understand that more women get breast cancer than men?

seriously?

Absolutely I am.

I don't know what your job is, and I don't share mine on here, but there are a very wide range of people out there.

You may be quite young - it was shocking to me, too, when I started out, post-uni, to see just how below average below average can sometimes mean. I just hadn't realised.

Awkward to discuss, but sadly true.

You also may not have noticed that in my post I distinguish between the impression given by the website (I genuinely left it thinking, Huh, maybe there's an 85:15 female-to-male split or something, that's way closer than I'd thought!) to the actual proportions: 99+:-1 or so. As a fairly bright educated layperson, I did feel it was somewhat misleading in this way. I mean, the significance of this difference, and the implications of blurring the actual proportions for all groups, is fairly obvious.

The argument seems to be that Coppafeel is pointless because everyone just knows everything there is to know about breast cancer already.

I've just checked, and less than 1% of breast cancer cases in the UK are men. So let's focus on the women, shall we? A side note saying that men can get breast cancer too covers both men and the very odd transman who may think she's a man.

I think they're probably quite young, and clearly feel fairly emotional about this. As such, points made, I'm heading off. I do hope they give it some thought, though. It's disturbing to see "vitriol" bandied about in this way, and particularly concerning to see such a wide range of other vulnerable groups are dismissed or even not recognised here. Not to mention the lack of awareness of how quite extreme stats and public health understanding can intersect. It all worries me a lot, tbh. We need to retain understanding of these things, and the capacity for calm, informed discussion, if we're to have a hope in hell of ever building a truly inclusive society (as far as such a thing is ever possible).

Sorry, the above is in response to nicepotoftea.

The fact that the charity has called itself after a male juvenile expression makes me wonder who they're trying to reach. The fact that they've confused an important issue with genderwang speak makes me think it's all about performance and the fact that the women who started the charity is in the entertainment industry might be the reason for that.

Survey of meaning of "pectorals": 66% thought it meant the flesh of one's chest in the area of the pectoral muscle. 33% had no idea. On the very personal one hand, that's disappointing to me that they didn't all describe it as a muscle.

On the other hand of public cancer awareness campaign, I could see that 66% of them would check their breast tissue if asked to check their pecs for lumps.

At the conclusion of this, we had the big reveal. They all obediently did proper checks for breast cancer, and said they would have just done that straight away if I'd said breast cancer. I suggested the campaign could save lives of those men who could have breast cancer but wouldn't check if they were only told to check their breasts because they would think it was solely a women's issue.

Their reactions to this line of reasoning were... unsympathetic to their fellow men. I was surprised by that.

I brought up transmen, and they were more supportive of a campaign avoiding the word "breast" for the sake of transmen, than they were for men.

Some points brought up were:
i) but why would men look at the website in the first place, if they thought only women could get breast cancer? On this we've agreed that we need to check out the radio ads.
ii) whether the money the charity spends is cost effective, considering the low numbers of male breast cancer compared to other cancers in men. (I pointed out it's a breast cancer charity, so the charity's focus is going to be breast cancer, and other charities exist to focus on testicular cancer. Again I was surprised by how I had to fight the charity's corner.)

They do deliberately target younger age groups. (Their founder was diagnosed at 23 and I wasn't ware that she or her sister were in the entertainment industry)

I actually suspect that in general they would agree that it's vital to use clear, accurate language.

People just seem to have a blind spot about gender unless the person trying to impose it is a trad wife or a manosphere influencer.

Just skimmed the rest of the thread to fill in gaps before flying, and wanted to add on the subject of what people do and don't know...

Confession: I see pectorals, and think of fish. I honestly hardly believe they're muscles. I have this weird conviction that they can't be. Dunno know why, it's a blind spot. Is there a pectoral fin or something? I may google... when it's too late to edit this post so I can't rush back and edit in embarrassment.

Point is, though, with a disease that kills millions, you hone your messaging to maximise clarity, starting from the assumption that people don't know.

They often don't.

There's an interesting piece of research out there on the public health impacts of this fashionably de-sexed approach to public health messaging in contexts in which sex is a defining factor. Coupled with the reams upon reams of evidence about harms to women caused by the invisibilisation of the female body in medicine past and present (basically, that we've died, and continue to die, in our millions) it's really very disturbing.

🐠

(I'm now hoping that everyone agreeing with the above is secretly sharing that they, too, suffer from pectoral confusion. 😅)

I know next to nothing about fish, so I had to google this one. Turns out fish do have pectoral fins!