why i hate your shirt that says you love my tatas

Obviously this is about saving

me. I totally look like this, and

so do most women I know.

I’ll get to the degradation in a minute, but first – the utter oblivion that allows you to triumphantly display your objectification as though it is a valid, sincere rallying cry. Rallying for what, exactly? Because it isn’t to save me. See, right now I kind of hate my breasts, and so does my husband, and presumably all the folks who care about me are at least a little afraid of them. They contain the stuff of death. If they were gone, I would be safer. If they were gone I would also have explanations to offer, social situations would be rife with discomfort, and you in your tatas t-shirt would look at me, think of me, treat me, as less of a woman, because as far as you can tell my womanhood is intrinsic to these masses of ducts, fatty tissue, and cancer. You have bound my existence up into two b-sized packages and your shirt reminds me that saving them is a very important part of saving me, for how could they be mutually exclusive? But they are - one is not the other - and here I am having to remind myself of that constantly, to measure up in my own shower, to weigh what it could be like to woman without them, whether or not the long and painful recovery of reconstruction would be worthwhile. I weigh how reconstruction surgery with its weeks of hospitalization, cumbersome drainage bulbs, pain and limited movement might impact my ability to get a job, and for that I am very resentful. I resent the implications of your stupid shirt. I resent that I have questions related to its backwards message. I resent that you can wear this and get credit for having some stock or belief in a Cause.

I understand that it is meant to be funny, and indeed I have a wonderful sense of humor about my cancer. I have no sense of humor, however, about being degraded when I am at my most vulnerable. I am not dying, but my life is at risk to some degree, and in the face of that threat, I’d rather not be reminded that my worth in this culture is first as a woman (as opposed to just as a person) and that that worth is largely determined by my body. Your tatas shirt is a billboard; one that reminds me that survival may mean risking my femininity by your standards, one that asserts that the thing to save is not the woman, but the sexy source of the problem, and ultimately, one that proclaims your ignorance. 


*Disclaimer: Obviously, my two or three wonderful and generous readers, I'm not attacking you in this post, unless of course you have a tatas shirt, in which case, could you explain it to me?