Jezebel: breast defense

Experts are now debating about what age girls...

Tracie — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:45:00 EDT

Experts are now debating about what age girls should begin learning about breast cancer. Some fear that educating young girls might do more harm than good. "We're just going to scare them to death," says Lillie Shockney, director of the Breast Center at Johns Hopkins. She suggests that information on breast health should wait until girls get to college. We sort of think that educating little girls about their bodies would never truly scare them, since by the age of 12, they're already distracted by the knowledge that their bodies will never measure up anyway! [ABC News]

Even With Breasts, Black Women Get Short End Of The Stick

Tracie — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:30:00 EDT

So there's good news and bad news on the breast-health front. The good news is that breast cancer diagnoses have been on the decline for the past few years, decreasing by about 3.7% each year between 2001 and 2004, according to a report from the American Cancer Society. This is partly because women stopped taking hormone replacement therapy during menopause (the pros and cons of which have been argued so much that we don't know what the fuck to think). But what's troubling is that the decline in diagnoses is also attributed to the fact that fewer women are getting mammograms, therefore they're not being diagnosed. But still, death rates overall due to breast cancer have dropped about 2%. Dr. Harmon Eyre, a rep from the ACS said, "A woman today has a lower chance of dying from breast cancer than she's had in decades." Yay! The bad news is that statistic only really applies to white women and not black women. Boo!

Breast Cancer Deaths Continue To Drop [MSNBC]

Facebook: Boobs Are For Body-Shots, Not Baby-Feeding

Tracie — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:30:00 EDT

Facebook has began taking down pictures of women breastfeeding their children and in some cases, even banning users for putting the photos up in the first place. The claim is that such imagery is "obscene content." Okay, we think that women posting pictures of their babies sucking on their boobs is a little weird and maybe even a bit obnoxious, but nothing about it is obscene. 'Cause isn't breastfeeding the whole point of breasts? The Lactivists (an activist group who strive to normalize breastfeeding in public) are all up in arms about the situation, but they're also questioning the logic behind Facebook's no-suckling policy, as the images that were removed contained no nipples. In an official statement, Facebook said that they're not actually opposed to the titty-sucking as much as the actual flesh:

Photos containing an exposed breast do violate our Terms and are removed.

Now, we're not really hippies, and we're certainly not mothers (other than to our dogs and cats), but Christ, just let these people up their mother-child bonding shots if it's so important to them! Where the lines of obscenity are drawn here are just so completely arbitrary and retarded. And so are the Lactivists, actually. They're encouraging people to join their new Facebook group "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!", which currently has over 7000 members.

Breast Isn't Best On Facebook [TechCrunch]