Has feminism been replaced by the pink-ribbon breast cancer cult? When the House of Representatives passed the Stupak amendment, which would take abortion rights away even from women who have private insurance, the female response ranged from muted to inaudible.
A few weeks later, when the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended that regular screening mammography not start until age 50, all hell broke loose. Sheryl Crow, Whoopi Goldberg, and Olivia Newton-John raised their voices in protest; a few dozen non-boldface women picketed the Department of Health and Human Services. If you didn’t look too closely, it almost seemed as if the women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s had returned in full force.
Never mind that Dr. Susan Love, author of what the New York Times dubbed “the bible for women with breast cancer,” endorses the new guidelines along with leading women’s health groups like Breast Cancer Action, the National Breast Cancer Coalition, and the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN). For years, these groups have been warning about the excessive use of screening mammography in the U.S., which carries its own dangers and leads to no detectible lowering of breast cancer mortality relative to less mammogram-happy nations.
Nonetheless, on CNN last week, we had the unsettling spectacle of NWHN director and noted women’s health advocate Cindy Pearson speaking out for the new guidelines, while ordinary women lined up to attribute their survival from the disease to mammography. Once upon a time, grassroots women challenged the establishment by figuratively burning their bras. Now, in some masochistic perversion of feminism, they are raising their voices to yell, “Squeeze our tits!”
When the Stupak anti-choice amendment passed, and so entered the health reform bill, no congressional representative stood up on the floor of the House to recount how access to abortion had saved her life or her family’s well-being. And where were the tea-baggers when we needed them? If anything represents the true danger of “government involvement” in healthcare, it’s a health reform bill that — if the Senate enacts something similar — will snatch away all but the wealthiest women’s right to choose.
It’s not just that abortion is deemed a morally trickier issue than mammography. To some extent, pink-ribbon culture has replaced feminism as a focus of female identity and solidarity. When a corporation wants to signal that it’s “woman friendly,” what does it do? It stamps a pink ribbon on its widget and proclaims that some miniscule portion of the profits will go to breast cancer research. I’ve even seen a bottle of Shiraz called “Hope” with a pink ribbon on its label, but no information, alas, on how much you have to drink to achieve the promised effect. When Laura Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2007, what grave issue did she take up with the locals? Not women’s rights (to drive, to go outside without a man, etc.), but “breast cancer awareness.” In the post-feminist United States, issues like rape, domestic violence, and unwanted pregnancy seem to be too edgy for much public discussion, but breast cancer is all apple pie.
So welcome to the Women’s Movement 2.0: Instead of the proud female symbol — a circle on top of a cross — we have a droopy ribbon. Instead of embracing the full spectrum of human colors — black, brown, red, yellow, and white — we stick to princess pink. While we used to march in protest against sexist laws and practices, now we race or walk “for the cure.” And while we once sought full “consciousness” of all that oppresses us, now we’re content to achieve “awareness,” which has come to mean one thing — dutifully baring our breasts for the annual mammogram.
Look, the issue here isn’t healthcare costs. If the current levels of screening mammography demonstrably saved lives, I would say go for it, and damn the expense. But the numbers are increasingly insistent: Routine mammographic screening of women under 50 does not reduce breast cancer mortality in that group, nor do older women necessarily need an annual mammogram. In fact, the whole dogma about “early detection” is shaky, as Susan Love reminds us: the idea has been to catch cancers early, when they’re still small, but some tiny cancers are viciously aggressive, and some large ones aren’t going anywhere.
One response to the new guidelines has been that numbers don’t matter — only individuals do — and if just one life is saved, that’s good enough. So OK, let me cite my own individual experience. In 2000, at the age of 59, I was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer on the basis of one dubious mammogram followed by a really bad one, followed by a biopsy. Maybe I should be grateful that the cancer was detected in time, but the truth is, I’m not sure whether these mammograms detected the tumor or, along with many earlier ones, contributed to it: One known environmental cause of breast cancer is radiation, in amounts easily accumulated through regular mammography.
And why was I bothering with this mammogram in the first place? I had long ago made the decision not to spend my golden years undergoing cancer surveillance, but I wanted to get my Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) prescription renewed, and the nurse practitioner wouldn’t do that without a fresh mammogram.
As for the HRT, I was taking it because I had been convinced, by the prevailing medical propaganda, that HRT helps prevent heart disease and Alzheimer’s. In 2002, we found out that HRT is itself a risk factor for breast cancer (as well as being ineffective at warding off heart disease and Alzheimer’s), but we didn’t know that in 2000. So did I get breast cancer because of the HRT — and possibly because of the mammograms themselves — or did HRT lead to the detection of a cancer I would have gotten anyway?
I don’t know, but I do know that that biopsy was followed by the worst six months of my life, spent bald and barfing my way through chemotherapy. This is what’s at stake here: Not only the possibility that some women may die because their cancers go undetected, but that many others will lose months or years of their lives to debilitating and possibly unnecessary treatments.
You don’t have to be suffering from “chemobrain” (chemotherapy-induced cognitive decline) to discern evil, iatrogenic, profit-driven forces at work here. In a recent column on the new guidelines, patient-advocate Naomi Freundlich raises the possibility that “entrenched interests — in screening, surgery, chemotherapy and other treatments associated with diagnosing more and more cancers — are impeding scientific evidence.” I am particularly suspicious of the oncologists, who saw their incomes soar starting in the late 80s when they began administering and selling chemotherapy drugs themselves in their ghastly, pink-themed, “chemotherapy suites.” Mammograms recruit women into chemotherapy, and of course, the pink-ribbon cult recruits women into mammography.
What we really need is a new women’s health movement, one that’s sharp and skeptical enough to ask all the hard questions: What are the environmental (or possibly life-style) causes of the breast cancer epidemic? Why are existing treatments like chemotherapy so toxic and heavy-handed? And, if the old narrative of cancer’s progression from “early” to “late” stages no longer holds, what is the course of this disease (or diseases)? What we don’t need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies’ auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.
Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.
On Slate’s DoubleX Web site, Christine Rosen concluded from the study that “the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women’s complaints disguised as manifestos … and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act — in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs.” Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: “[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach … [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”
But it’s a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on SSRIs. For all the high-level head-scratching induced by the Stevenson and Wolfers study, hardly anyone has pointed out (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) that, even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone’s mood.
For starters, happiness is an inherently slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy, we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day after I opened the bills, but then was cheered up by a call from a friend, so what am I really?
In one well-known psychological experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire on life satisfaction, but only after they had performed the apparently irrelevant task of photocopying a sheet of paper for the experimenter. For a randomly chosen half of the subjects, a dime had been left for them to find on the copy machine. As two economists summarize the results: “Reported satisfaction with life was raised substantially by the discovery of the coin on the copy machine — clearly not an income effect.”
As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eyeball. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called “ordered probit estimates” do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: “Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006 women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category.” Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness — well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.
Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact, and the suicide rate has been the gold standard of misery since sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote the book on it in 1897. As Stevenson and Wolfers report — somewhat sheepishly, we must imagine — “contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample [1972-2006].” Women may get the blues; men are more likely to get a bullet through the temple.
Another distracting little data point that no one, including the authors, seems to have much to say about is that, while “women” have been getting marginally sadder, black women have been getting happier and happier. To quote the authors: “happiness has trended quite strongly upward for both female and male African Americans … Indeed, the point estimates suggest that well-being may have risen more strongly for black women than for black men.” The study should more accurately be titled “The Paradox of Declining White Female Happiness,” only that might have suggested that the problem could be cured with melanin and Restylane.
But let’s assume the study is sound and that (white) women have become less happy relative to men since 1972. Does that mean that feminism ruined their lives?
Not according to Stevenson and Wolfers, who find that “the relative decline in women’s well-being … holds for both working and stay-at-home mothers, for those married and divorced, for the old and the young, and across the education distribution” — as well as for both mothers and the childless. If feminism were the problem, you might expect divorced women to be less happy than married ones and employed women to be less happy than stay-at-homes. As for having children, the presumed premier source of female fulfillment: They actually make women less happy.
And if the women’s movement was such a big downer, you’d expect the saddest women to be those who had some direct exposure to the noxious effects of second-wave feminism. As the authors report, however, “there is no evidence that women who experienced the protests and enthusiasm in the 1970s have seen their happiness gap widen more than those women who were just being born during that period.”
What this study shows, if anything, is that neither marriage nor children make women happy. (The results are not in yet on nipple piercing.) Nor, for that matter, does there seem to be any problem with “too many choices,” “work-life balance” or the “second shift.” If you believe Stevenson and Wolfers, women’s happiness is supremely indifferent to the actual conditions of their lives, including poverty and racial discrimination. Whatever “happiness” is …
So why all the sudden fuss about the Wharton study, which first leaked out two years ago anyway? Mostly because it’s become a launching pad for a new book by the prolific management consultant Marcus Buckingham, best known for “First, Break All the Rules and Now, Find Your Strengths.” His new book, “Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently,” is a cookie-cutter classic of the positive-thinking self-help genre: First, the heart-wrenching quotes from unhappy women identified only by their e-mail names (Countess1, Luveyduvy, etc.), then the stories of “successful” women, followed by the obligatory self-administered test to discover “the role you were bound to play” (Creator, Caretaker, Influencer, etc.), all bookended with an ad for the many related products you can buy, including a “video introduction” from Buckingham, a “participant’s guide” containing “exercises” to get you to happiness, and a handsome set of “Eight Strong Life Plans” to pick from. The Huffington Post has given Buckingham a column in which to continue his marketing campaign.
It’s an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered “micromastia” — the “disease” of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43 percent of women have been found to suffer from “female sexual dysfunction,” or FSD. Now, it’s unhappiness, and the range of potential “cures” is dazzling: Seagrams, Godiva and Harlequin, take note.
When the House managers wrapped up their presentation in the president’s impeachment trial two weeks ago, the only question was “How will Clinton get out of this?” But then the great Houdini delivered his State of the Union address, in which he cleverly outflanked the Republicans on the right by proposing a first step toward the privatization — i.e., elimination — of Social Security along with vast new largesse for the Pentagon. Hillary beamed; the pundits swooned; and the question du jour became, How will the Republicans ever get out of this, and why don’t they do so now?
For surely the impeachment process has not been the great American agon we were promised — Custer’s Last Stand, Iwo Jima, the battle at the O.K. Corral. The visuals have been tragically dull, enlivened only by the chief justice’s scowl and whimsically gold-striped robe. CNN, with its gavel-to-gavel coverage of the tedium, became a video dead zone, watched by no Americans other than the president’s lawyers or, more likely, by a work crew of illegal Mexican immigrants and former welfare mothers hired to do the watching for them. To make a wise and timely statement about the proceedings at any time in the last few months, all one had to do was mix and match the words “William Jefferson Clinton,” “the Constitution of the Yew-nited States,” “impeachable offense,” “the American people” and “fair and bipartisan” (or, depending on one’s party affiliation, “partisan and grossly unfair”). Some of the networks took to recycling the same “live” impeachment commentaries day after day, probably as a cost-saving measure, and in full confidence that no viewer would notice.
But there is one thing that has held the Republicans to their thankless task: witnesses. They want witnesses, preferably eyewitnesses, and they persisted till they got them. This deep, self-destructive yearning is not to be confused, however, with the gospel shout, “Can I get a witness!” Because the witness the Republicans most desperately craved is the luscious, creamy-skinned Monica Lewinsky. Monica was an important part of their probe, they announced. It was essential, according to Rep. Bill McCollum, that they “examine Monica Lewinsky.” Later the language took an even more revealing turn, when Ken Starr insisted that the Republicans had the right to “debrief” her. Of course, the Republicans would love to de-brief Monica, since, according to his sworn testimony, not even Clinton achieved that.
The Democrats quickly picked up on their antagonists’ prurient intentions, countering that a Monica appearance in the Senate would be a “burlesque.” For weeks, like members of an aboriginal all-male totemic cult warding off wifely intrusions, they raged against the threatened pollution of the hallowed chambers with smut and God-knows-what noxious female secretions. When those warnings failed to resonate, they painted a grim S&M picture of what a Republican interview of Monica would be like: The poor child, facing a roomful of men who have the power to throw her in prison, would be subject to unimaginable probings.
Last weekend, the sexual drama reached a mini-climax with Lewinsky’s arrival in Washington. The press corps assaulted her from all sides, struggling for a shot of her face, and frustrated to find it modestly hidden by a baseball cap, the American girl’s equivalent of a head-scarf. (“Not our finest moment,” a CNN anchor observed of this footage, pursing his lips.) The next day Republican Reps. McCollum, Hutchinson and Bryant spent two hours alone with Monica in a $5,000 a day hotel suite — a different suite than the one she had slept in, the press assured us, lest we envision the foursome conferring on rumpled sheets. Emerging from the interview, the congressmen were all flushed and exuberant, reporting that she was “poised,” “intelligent” and, what is most important in the age of Viagra, “helpful.” McCollum wore his usual suit and tie, but Hutchinson and Bryant appeared for the first time in casual sweaters, thrown on, perhaps, in haste.
And if no hanky-panky was discussed or proposed, what are we to make of Monica’s reported post-interview comment, “I gave them nothing”? Note the verb: not “told,” but “gave.” What was anyone expecting her to give them — oral gratification, perhaps, or a sexually transmitted disease? Undeterred, the Republican Bryant pleaded with the Senate on Tuesday, “Wouldn’t you at least like to see and hear from her?” — “his gentle Tennessee drawl inviting,” in the New York Times’ florid description, “as he urged the Senate court not to be shy and to call Monica S. Lewinsky.” Bryant was rewarded for his pleading by being the manager appointed to depose Lewinsky; according to reports, of her three interrogators, Monica picked him personally, like Bachelor No. 1 on “The Dating Game.”
So don’t let anyone tell you, “This is not about sex.” The impeachment process only makes sense when you understand that the Republicans are the pimply high school nerds who can’t get a date, while Clinton is the football captain for whom all the girls eagerly “put out.” Since the Republicans can’t get Clinton, they’re determined to have at his discarded girlfriend, even if their frantic efforts to “examine” and “de-brief” her, which have now culminated in a dreamy weekend deposition, end up costing them their House seats. Right-wingers are also subject to the promptings of the flesh, perhaps even more so than the fabled, long-gone tax-and-spend libertines of the left. And in case anyone needed further proof, Clinton’s State of the Union speech demonstrated once and for all that it’s possible to be a sexual scamp and a good Republican too.
Ah, Karl! You thought those frantic scratchings and snortings were the sounds of capitalism digging its own grave, but all it was doing was preparing a nice niche for you — a market niche, in fact. The leftish British press Verso has seized upon the 150th anniversary of “The Communist Manifesto” to re-issue that rousing old tract in an upscale version, suitable for display at the cash register. “It’s very chic and looks like something for the sybaritic classes,” Verso’s PR person observes proudly, adding that it should “get us some great displays in the book chains.” Adding impenetrable levels of irony, the cover has been designed by those playful ex-Soviet artists Komar and Melamid, whose gorgeously rippling red banner against a black background should be readily accessorizable with the cashmeres in primary tones coming to us for fall.
Why didn’t Marx, or his co-author, Friedrich Engels, who knew a thing or two about running a business himself, think of this long ago? As Eric Hobsbawm tells us in his introduction to the Verso edition, sales of the original manifesto were pathetically sub-mid-list for decades after it was written. As for foreign rights, forget about it until well into the 1860s, when the International Working Men’s Association began to take off. One can imagine their editor taking the authors to lunch and saying, “Karl, Fred, you’ve got some great stuff in here. That part about ‘nothing to lose but your chains’ just blew me away. I mean, the prose rocks. But we have to think packaging too. Like what about a pop-up version? A collectible bourgeois-piggie figures tie-in with Taco Bell? Or the movie version with Kate Winslet as the factory gal and Anthony Hopkins as the specter-that-is-haunting-Europe?”
But of course back in those days it would have been at least unwise for members of the “sybaritic classes” to go mincing about with their designer copies of “The Communist Manifesto” in hand. In the mid-19th century, fat cats could still recall the whistle of the guillotine blade as it headed for an overprivileged neck; they had seen the delirious, underfed masses rise up — in Germany, Italy, France and the Austrian Empire — in 1848. So there’s no use blaming Karl and Fred for their lack of entrepreneurial initiative. One hundred fifty years ago, the conditions — both “objective” and “subjective,” as they would have put it — were not yet ripe for the commodification of revolution itself.
First the world had to be made safe for irony on this scale and complexity. Communism — or at least something superficially resembling the manifesto’s prescription — had to be attempted, road-tested and rejected worldwide. “Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State”: Been there, done that. “Centralization of credit in the hands of the State”: No danger that that’s going to catch on among America’s gun-bearing blue-collar class. In its naive faith that “the State” could be commandeered overnight to serve the workers as loyally as it normally serves the rich, “The Communist Manifesto” is as much an antique as those darling little Lenin pins that are available by the fistful at the flea markets in Berlin today. Post 1989, the manifesto bears the implicit warning label: Fun as it may sound, you don’t want to try this at home.
But it was not enough for communism to fail. Before it could contemplate marketing Marx, capitalism itself had to change: It had to evolve to the point where it fully conformed to its own description in the manifesto. For a sizable stretch of the 20th century, in at least the “advanced” parts of the globe, only crackpots and subscribers to Monthly Review believed that the workers were being ground down to pauperdom. Anyone could see that machinists and truck drivers were buying houses in Levittown, second cars and college educations for their kids. “In rapidly changing modern urban America,” a 1964 sociology text triumphantly declared, “traditional social classes are nonexistent.” As for the destruction of “all old-established national industries,” as predicted in the manifesto, and their replacement by a global system of production and consumption: Sure, but you had to wait until the 1990s to find Benneton in Beijing or Kentucky Fried Chicken in New Delhi.
So for a while there, in the golden age after World War II, capitalism sought to spite communism by treating the workers as if they might be useful as consumers too, and hence worthy of a living wage. It was not until some time in the 1970s that capitalism decided to take “The Communist Manifesto” as its personal self-improvement guide — going global with a vengeance, treating the workers (including increasing numbers of doctors, teachers, scientists and writers as well as the old-fashioned heavy-lifting and lug-turning proles) like so many disposable “factors of production.” The Great Polarization between rich and poor, predicted so long ago in the manifesto, now dominates the social contours of the world, from Los Angeles to Johannesburg, from London to Santiago.
And it is of course this deepening polarization and “immiserization” that gives the up-market new manifesto its delightfully up-to-date frisson and leads book dealers to believe that stockbrokers will want to display it in their corner offices as a sign of terminal cockiness. They can buy it on their lunch hour just a few blocks from Wall Street, at the World Trade Center Borders, for example, which is planning a colorful window display, and where the workers ($7 an hour) exist in what one of them described to me as a “culture of absolute hopelessness,” thanks to management’s obsessive wage-busting campaign. Or they can take it home to the coffee table and insist that the maid ($8 an hour and zero benefits) dust it daily so that the red banner on the cover maintains its high gleam. Commie chic is no end of fun once the commies are dead and the workers of the world have been beaten into submission.
So, thanks to the inner Hegelian workings of capitalism, “The Communist Manifesto” finally works as an accessory, a stocking-stuffer, a badge of consummate capitalist cool. But what about its “use value,” as Karl himself might have asked? Does it work, in other words, as a manifesto? Well, there are a few problems, and not just the obvious one that real-and-existing communism let Marx and Engels down so unkindly. The other disappointment is capitalism. There is not and has never been a social system as brilliantly dynamic and relentlessly all-consuming as the capitalism of “The Communist Manifesto.” It was, according to its authors, slated to destroy every vestige of the feudal and patriarchal past and, with one big steam-powered whoosh, propel humankind into the bleak cold world of the Modern, where our true options — socialism or barbarism — would finally be disclosed:
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Faced with the capitalist leviathan, religion was supposed to wither away, gender differences disappear and nationalism — the most successful religion of all — was supposed to be smashed by globalization, along with its peculiar object of worship, the nation-state. Then and only then, without the distractions of jingoism, superstition and patriarchy, would the working class be ready to address itself full time to the business of class war.
Still, “The Communist Manifesto” is well worth the $12 that Verso is asking. Despite the hype, its message is a timeless one that bears repeating every century or so: The meek shall triumph and the mighty shall fall; the hungry and exhausted will get restless and someday — someday! — rise up against their oppressors. The prophet Isaiah said something like this, and so, a little more recently, did Jesus. At a mere 96 pages, you can think of it as a greeting card, or even a kind of wake-up call, for that special person in your life — such as, for example, your boss.
Workers hoist a pink ribbon in honor of breast cancer awareness on the front of the White House in Washington, October 26, 2009. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (UNITED STATES POLITICS HEALTH SOCIETY)(Credit: Reuters) 
