Not Another Cancer Story

The media presentation of breast cancer has often struck me as strange. The papers (specifically, tabloids) frequently trumpet at front-page volume causal factors that women can do nothing about - stress, for instance. They explain "gigantic increases" in rates of breast cancer with reference to choices like delaying childbirth and taking the pill over a period of years, rarely if ever stopping to remark that even if these increases do stretch to a gigantic 100% (since 1978), that still (for women under 40) amounts to no more than 28 per 100,000.

When a celebrity - Kylie Minogue, most recently, and the singer Anastacia before her - speaks openly about her experience of the disease, she is praised for her generosity, on the basis that high-profile breast cancer sufferers make regular women feel better about their tumours. This is particularly bizarre - sure, celebrity endorsement might alter one's view of a handbag, but the notion that a potentially life-threatening condition can be sweetened by the fact that someone in Heat has also had it is patently absurd.

In common with much of the news coverage of infertility, there seems to be a background hum of misogyny in all this. The message is: "You think you're in control of your lives, you women; you think you can find your own balance between work and family, navigate your own sex lives, make decisions as a man would, but in fact your bodies are murky, dangerous places that will find a way to punish you should you stray from the path of true femininity." Maybe that sounds a little paranoid, but frankly it has never bothered me overmuch, since you can hear an anti-female hum in a lot of things if you listen closely enough, and as a gender we're big enough to ignore it.

However, this disproportionate media prominence of breast cancer has had a knock-on effect on the status of the disease in the oncological hierarchy. Because such a lot is written about it, it has filtered into the policy-making consciousness that breast cancer is a more pressing issue than, say, bowel cancer. This was particularly marked in this year's election campaign, when Tony Blair visited two cancer hospitals to roll out one of the key election pledges, that all breast cancer referrals, not just the urgent ones, would be seen by a specialist within two weeks, and treated within a month. Already, the government's record on breast cancer was laudable, with an extra 280,000 screenings undertaken since 2001.

I went on this meet-and-greet, and while I waited for my four and a half seconds of "face time" with the prime minister, got chatting to a senior oncologist at the cancer unit in Redditch. He wasn't going to sneeze at extra funds, whatever body part they were targeted at, but he did point out that women got the lion's share of these new initiatives, when in fact there was nothing about bowel cancer (unisex, but biased towards men) that made it less dangerous, or any less deserving of screening.

So I put this to Blair and he said, "Oh yes, we're introducing bowel cancer screenings as well." Yet there was no mention of this in any of the electioneering, no handshaking with bowel cancer survivors or talk of how "there is nothing more worrying for a man than if they think they may have cancer" (which is what he said about women).

Of course, if the money's going in anyway, it doesn't matter what politicians choose to concentrate on with their sloganeering. Except for the fact that one of the steadiest differences between the genders is that women will visit the doctor and men won't. The reason that married men have a better life expectancy than single men is attributed almost entirely to the fact that their wives nag them to heed symptoms that they would otherwise ignore.

If there's a case for prioritising one gender over another, in media coverage or election promises, then it should be men. Ideally, of course, there should be parity, but the worst of all possible worlds is the one we're in, where the gender that is more aware, more proactive, altogether better at looking after itself, is the one that gets the most attention.

Because of the personal horror of a cancer scare, there's never an appropriate time to say: "Come on, not another breast cancer story." The only human response to Kylie's illness is one of sympathy. But now that she appears to be on the mend, perhaps it is appropriate to suggest some kind of balance in the media - that each cancer be discussed in proportion with its incidence, rather than according to some tacit decision that women need the wind put up them and men don't. Just because it ultimately favours women doesn't make this gender disparity any better than any other.