Phoenix Living

One of the questions I was asked after putting up the recent “questions” post was:  “Since breasts are essentially secondary sex organs, do you find that your sexuality has changed since the surgery?”

I had an immediate response to this one, and another response after giving it some thought, I’ll share both here.

The immediate response was no, I don’t think my sexuality changed much due to the surgery and loss of breast.  I think current stress in the family causing at least my husband to have a temporary libido decrease has affected my daily sexuality more than the surgery has.  (Though we’re certainly doing what we can as energy levels permit, enjoyably!) I’ve certainly found that the cliché of an increased libido from the “new lease on life” effect of narrowly missing death has been reasonably true in my case; I’m interested in sex most days, though sometimes the physical energy doesn’t cooperate with the desire.  I also find it easy to take care of those needs myself when a partner isn’t available, but that’s not much different from pre-cancer attitudes.

One thing that I think has drastically helped my new body-shape perception internally has been the across-the-board acceptance of how I look from family and friends.  I’m told I look great, the scar is “neat” or “pretty”, and all of this matches how I feel.  Certainly early on after surgery there were some body image issues coming up periodically for me, but they were much easier not to internalize as truth due to the awesome support I received.

Another thing that sounds opposite to the above but has still contributed to a very comfortable body image is my assumption that for MOST random strangers I will meet or encounter, I will be Other and not a sexually attractive being.  Not only do we monkeys have a biological tendency to prefer symmetry of form, but our culture in America has an unhealthy obsession with mammary tissue.  So I do tend to assume that most people will not be checking me out in a crowd.  This perversely has freed me up to think about it even less than I did before — which wasn’t much — and dress how I please, look how I please, and walk as if I’m a gorgeous goddess even more easily than pre-cancer.  I also tend to assume that anyone worth paying attention to will be able to see the attractiveness in front of them and not get fixated on blemish-free symmetry.

After some thought, I think a couple of things have changed.  In general, I don’t really perceive breasts as sexual organs, though I’ll still notice with aesthetic appreciation someone with a particularly well-sculpted set.  On the other hand, my husband is helping me explore sexualizing the ur-boob, touching it during shared intimacy as well as more casually in cuddling.  I find this has done much good in assisting my subconscious to accept my new form.

These days I have a much more ambiguous relationship with the remaining breast than the mostly-missing one.  How do you continue to love and accept a body part that you’re planning to remove before it tries to kill you?  You can’t reject it outright while it’s still a part of you, or you’ll get alignment weirdnesses and messed up patterns of muscle tension and possible other health issues.  However, you also can’t fully trust it, especially with the genetic component of cancer mutation present.  Conditional acceptance of a body part is a strange thing to attempt healthily, for someone used to more comfort with my own body than that.  It varies from day to day how well I do on that front.

I feel healthier than I have in years, which I’m told is fairly normal after a life-threatening health crisis — not the least of which is now I have more visceral motivation than most to get and stay healthier.  That has certainly contributed to more emotional equilibrium as well as easier bounce-back from heightened emotional states.  It also makes it practically much easier to make myself exercise and stay active even when I’m-tired-and-don’-wanna.

I have to assume all of these factors are contributing to my current healthy and vibrant libido as well as my available physical energy for daily activities which is still improving weekly.  I’m well aware my experiences in this area are nothing like most people with breast cancer.  It’s obvious from the available e-literature on the subject that most people are expected to be sexless and hate themselves post-mastectomy, or only feel better if they get reconstructive surgery.  I don’t expect everyone to follow my lead, but I am here to tell you that those expectations aren’t inevitable.

More questions or thoughts? That was fun to think about!

If you missed this comment, take a moment to go read it now.  It gives me happy shivers every time I read it or tell someone about it.  This is part of why I’m writing about the cancer experience, and one of the reasons I’ll keep writing about it.

It is awesome and humbling to think I might have helped already save a life by scribing words.  And motivating!

PS - Ladies, do your breast exams monthly, no, really!  Train your lovers or spouses to do it for you if you just can’t make yourself remember.  Make it a ritual.  Make it a routine.  Whatever makes you DO IT.  However weird, scary, uncomfortable, or forgetful you feel, trust me — actual cancer is WAY WORSE.

After I know more about what’s going on internally, I’ll be writing up a couple of informative-style articles about breast trauma and possible consequences. In my research, I’ve found that while the wisdom is common that “It’s a bad idea to whack a boob”, it’s nearly impossible to find a clear and easy answer as to WHY it’s a bad idea, complete with examples. In addition, I’ve found an obvious lack of well-designed breast protection gear for larger-breasted women. So for you, my readers, if you’d like to assist with this, I’d appreciate the following:

1: Links to already existing stories, or your own personal anecdotes, about you or someone you know who has had experiences in non-cancerous breast problems, especially those with blunt-force trauma as the injury origin.

2: Links to protection gear for large breasts, especially any you have personal experiences with or know someone who has. Alternately, contact information for someone capable of designing lightweight protective chest gear that both covers all of the breast area and can be made in larger sizes. I’d be glad to publicly promote the services of any designer I end up working with, as I strongly doubt I’m the only large-breasted non-athlete woman who wants to engage in more active sporting or sparring events.

Thanks for helping! This is my sort of activism — where I can fix an information gap by writing, whee! It’ll still be a bit before these go up, I’m still gathering information as well as going through the medical issue, but I’d love for people to spread the word to any of your well-endowed friends when I do post them. If you can help on either of the above points, either leave a comment here or send me a private message (reesa at reesabrown dot com).

Getting the bad news out of the way first, here is an incredibly concerning article about the latest battle on the women’s equal rights front. I’ll get sterilized before I’ll live under any “pre-pregnant” laws if they actually start passing them…and if you know anyone who lives in Utah, get them to write the governor to veto!

In more pleasant news, I finally got around to joining the Horror Writers Association. I qualified as an Affiliate member with the publication of “Memory Box” in the Stoker Award-winning Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet, by Dark Scribe Press. It slipped off my list of priorities in the busy-ness of the last several months, so I’m glad to have finally taken care of that.

Related to that, I found out this week that the World Horror Convention will be in Austin,Texas for 2011. How cool is that!

For those of you following the Callie posts, I’ll put up a separate page when we get a little farther along in the story, collecting them in one easier-to-read place. In the meantime I’ll post a link collection every 5 entries or so, like now!

Inside the Box
A Box Has No Windows
Opening the Door
At The Bar
Finding help?

For those of you who haven’t heard this yet, a Canadian writer (Peter Watts) was assaulted and detained by American border guards as he was leaving the US to return home. For those of you who aren’t near enough to a border to have the experience: you are often searched when entering or re-entering (if US citizen) the US from traveling abroad. It’s historically much more unusual for them to conduct exit searches, though these days the frequency is rising. Setting aside questions of what exactly happened and who was provoked when, as there’s already enough unpleasant debate engaging elsewhere on those topics…

Why should you, average (or not so) citizen, be concerned about this? Hasn’t that crap already been happening for a while now? Well, sure. But how, exactly, do you think fascist states get formed? You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly the cattle cars are rolling down your street to cart off dissidents when everything was fine before. It’s much more the “how to boil a live frog” concept. Those in power who want more of it encroach on our rights and liberties a little at a time, and for quite a while it’s in areas the Average Citizen will never encounter or notice. A few years ago, en route to a protest at the capital about the suspension of habeus corpus, I encountered a Good Citizen — middle aged mother and white-collar wage earner, member of her community. This person in complete seriousness tried to argue us out of going, by stating that after all, if you followed all the rules, that suspension only applied to terrorists and communists and Bad People. And she really, truly believed in that, you could tell in her arguments. She did not understand why we were concerned unless we had something to hide.

This attitude is not only common, it’s encouraged by those same folks attempting to take power. They want you to not notice what is going on and changing behind the scenes until your ability to effective stop them has been neutralized. They want you to make their arguments for them as your civil rights trickle away. So up until recently, most of the increasingly concerning signs of what’s happening in our country have been limited to the less enfranchised: the poor, the prisoners, the foreign guests and business folk and travelers that have to come here or choose to come here. (Though America is also suffering a marked decrease in incoming foreign tourist dollars since about, oh, when Dubya went into office. None of our foreign “allies” seem to believe that Obama is any different in action or making this country safer to visit; just a prettier face on the Same Old Shit.)

When Steve and I were in Ciudad Juarez last year, we were shepherded around by a delightfully charming married couple, Irena and Sergio. On the long, slow wait to get back across the border from Mexico into the US, they told us an incredibly unpleasant story about increased issues with the US border. Sergio had, a couple of years previously, been working in El Paso and crossing the border daily for several months. One morning, he entered the US normally and worked a full day. On his return (again, while trying to leave the US and re-enter his native country), he was arrested and detained without legal representation or notice to his family. Irena, five months pregnant at the time, spent several days tracking down what had happened to him, to finally find where he was and learn that his name had matched one of the names on the most recent list of “suspected terrorists and dissidents” that all border guards receive regularly, and they arrested him without any further checking to see if, perhaps, there might be more than one person with that name. He was held for two months with no lawyer, no trial, no other reasons given, and no legal rights. The only reason he isn’t still there today is near serendipity. Sergio was a former mariachi singer and had been in a classical mariachi band for many years. They had toured in the US, and the governor of Arizona had been particularly fond of their performance. Irena contacted the Arizona governor with a request for help, and he was willing to write a letter stating that he had met Sergio and was confident he was not a terrorist. Irena and Sergio assured me that theirs was in no way an isolated case. At that point (last year), nearly every family they knew in Juarez had had conflict or family members detained or personal property stolen by the US border guards and on and on the stories go. Nearly all of them have much fewer resources than Irena and Sergio did to get some semblance of their normal life back. They told us this story as we were passing by Bush’s Folly, the half-finished wall being built between the Mexican and US borders. My fellow US citizens: a wall that is designed to keep people out is also quite well situated to keep people in.

Peter Watts is a writer. If your goal is more fascism, after you’ve cowed the lowest rungs and the foreigners, you start moving your influence further out. Writers, artists, political activists, and other iconoclastic categories that might have a chance to spread the awareness of what is happening around us to large groups of people — these are usually the next prime targets. This is worth my notice and attention, and yours, because it’s one more sign in an already-ongoing and concerning trend. You know how these things keep going, we’ve seen it before. Silence perpetuates injustice. Looking the other way perpetuates injustice. An “it can’t/won’t happen to me” attitude perpetuates injustice.

I’ve seen a lot of people quoting the “first they came for the Jews” famous poem. As Steve pointed out, perhaps the most sad and telling bit of this is, that is an incorrect quote. The actual quote begins, “First they came for the communists…” and so anyone who misquotes it has already committed the first step, unconsciously, in this overall pattern of deciding that there are some groups that it’s ok to treat this way and some it isn’t.

This is Not OK. For anyone. No more silence, No more inaction. All of you reading this: if you are not speaking and acting on the injustices you encounter when you encounter them, you are part of the problem. I’m not trying to tell you how to do those things, as I think that’s dependent on the individual. Some people can speak out publicly like this, some can’t. But all of us can speak up in various ways in our daily lives, when we encounter people spreading ignorance, and help present and spread a different point of view. I think the era of protest marches is dead (possibly a discussion for another post), but I also think that there are still ways you can be more activist within your community or beyond it. For those of you financially flush, don’t forget to donate to good political, activist, and humanitarian causes — but for gods’ sake, do at least a little research to make sure your money is going where it should, before you hand it over.

Peter Watts’ own account of the event is here. It’s also being discussed on Boing Boing, Making Light, and many other places around the ‘Net if you wish to educate yourself further.

And just so you all have the correct quote everyone is mangling, from a German pastor speaking out against the inactivity of the German public during Hitler’s time to do what they could to stop the Nazi power takeover (his Wiki article is pretty interesting itself, check it out):

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

–Martin Niemöller