By Trudy Simpson, Staff ReporterIN AN energetic and often humorous speech at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel yesterday Dr. Glenda Simms, head of the Bureau of Women's Affairs urged women to reject societal attempts to define them in terms of their body parts.
While the specific focus of her address at the Jamaica Cancer Society's luncheon Keeping Abreast 2002 was on breast cancer, she also raised concerns about gender issues.
She urged the mostly female audience to fight attempts to further "over-sexualise" and objectify women's bodies through commercialism, consumerism, unreasonable and unrealistic body images by "taking back their bodies".
She said that women's bodies, unlike men's, were often not seen as a whole and so the breasts, once a generic term used in reference to both sexes, is now used almost exclusively in reference to women. She said that from colonial times, there have been attempts to use euphemisms to describe women's body parts, calling breasts melon, "white meat", boobs, headlights, titties, mountain and lemons.
"If we were not differentiated by breasts (in earlier times), then why is that women's breasts have now taken such a personality? The kind of personality that keeps us in our places, the kind of personality that tells us that we are fragments of humanity, the kind that says we are body parts. There are times when the breasts become a part and the belly sometimes and then as for the bottoms, they also have meaning and even necks have meaning and even legs of course have meaning but men, they only have one body," she said, to loud applause from the hundreds who took every chair in the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel's Grande Jamaica Suite, the venue for the event.
Organised by the Jamaica Cancer Society and cancer support group, Reach for Recovery, the luncheon was held as part of activities for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
"We are not going to be body parts anymore. We are going to be whole human beings and so we are challenging you to take back your bodies and you men, take back your breasts!" she said, evoking ripples of laughter among the 600 or so men and women in the audience.
She also used humour to show men that they could get breast cancer and go undetected because of a culture which forces them to deny even the faintest possibility that their breasts could be a possible source of erotic stimulation.
"In this...society, there are a majority of men who will never discover their breasts. In spite of this denial, men do get breast cancer and if they get breast cancer, they have breasts so I want to hear the men in the room say I have breasts and touch your breasts now. They have a right to touch their breasts but you have no right to touch another without permission," Dr. Simms declared, sending the 600-strong audience into gales of laughter and a frenzy of clapping.
But there were serious messages behind the laughter. Dr. Simms and Ed Gallimore, whose late wife Jacqueline was diagnosed 14 years ago, called on men to support their partners and relatives whether or not they lose their breasts and showed that cancer was more than a physical illness because it had social, psychological and personal impact on women.
She said that when women get breast cancer, it is often seen as an affront to their womanhood and they question whether their men will still want them or if they should remove their breasts because what is a woman without a breast?
Sounding like a passionate pastor at the pulpit on a Sunday, she said that she has told loved ones to "take that breast off. You are still a woman and if the man does not help you, get rid of him!" Rousing applause and cries of "yeah" followed her declaration.
