So many of you might have noticed on Face-book today that many of your female friends seemed to be randomly posting colors in their status updates. I saw many colors today including pink, red, plain old boring white, black, purple and gold, etc. What all the guys didn't know is someone started an email chain asking women to post the color of their bra in order to raise awareness for breast cancer.
While I support any and all efforts to cure breast cancer, this little idea of awareness got me thinking about how big the differences between Men and Women are. What would people say if men on face-book starting posting the type, and or color of their underwear in order to promote prostate cancer awareness? What about the t-shirts and car magnets that say save the Ta Ta's. What if men were to wear similar shirts or pass out magnets that said Save the penis?
Somehow I am thinking that this would be considered socially wrong. So my question is why is it ok for women to do such things and men cant? Am I wrong in my assumption? Could men do things like this and it be considered socially acceptable? If it is not socially acceptable then why?
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Well, I wouldn't care.
ReplyDeleteI think the main difference is girls are pretty and sweet and smell nice, while boys ar gross and germy.
and their underwear doesn't come in all that many colors.
Also prostates aren't located in the penis- the gland is in the body behind the base of the penis- while breat cancer is actually located in the breast tissue of the body.
All cultures define roles and acceptable behaviors. Often, these apply differing scales of acceptable behavior. These are relativistic and not transitively based on universal truths (although nearly every culture believes their views to be universally correct). I assert that nearly every culture has roles definitions which contain logical contradictions and principles of unfairness.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, a save the penis sticker might more aptly be applied by the anti-circumcision folks.
More directly to the point, female breast cancer gets more attention than male cancers (including male breast cancer) because it tends to have a higher lethality rate than prostate cancer. Unfortunately, women die of other gender-associated illness more often than breast cancer.
Our social awareness has given breast cancer greater emphasis than the clinical data supports, if our over-all goal is to keep more women alive with a given input of resources.