I’m reading a multi-article feature in O Magazine’s most recent issue (October 2017, vol 8 no 10) — “Your Cancer, Your Breasts.” Good stuff: medical information in approachable language, personal stories from women who went through various of the procedural options, sidebars with definitions…

…all the things that happen when magazines like this do their best journalism. And the pictures!

The pictures. I would link to the feature so you could see for yourselves, but it won’t be on the public web ’till next month — the pictures are beautiful. Survivors of all ages, of all post-operative choices, many of them wearing tattoos across their healed chests. 

Did I mention they’re all topless? Since that’s some of the point, I presume: see, you women who haven’t been through this? This is what it looks like After. 

This rocks. 

  

I don’t spend much time on this blog climbing the feminist barricades. For one, it’s not something I think about a whole lot these days, vs., for example, the state of my soul. <grins> For two, I’ve never found that that kind of advocacy persuades others –not in Christian life, not in feminist life.

But as I admire, and yes, study, these images, awareness creeps over me:

So far, the only breasts that are covered are the ones that have an areola and nipple.

What the what??!!

——-

That the Good Lord watches over children and fools I have never doubted. That I would have done this TWICE before 8am strikes me as a case of moving a little faster than my guardian angel can quite manage…

Six photographs I have studied, seven pages of the feature I’ve read, BUT I hadn’t reached the end of the story. 

It is wisest to reach the end of the story before theorizing. Don’t you think?

Because the seventh image is of a woman, arms stretched overhead, bare-bosomed and areola/nipple on display. It’s a 3D tattoo, in fact–cool!

Whew. I’m backing down from that rickety pile of pallets and burned-out cars and putting my feet back on the ground where they belong. 

Ok, it’s true that the only born-with areola here is covered, but maybe that’s her choice. I’m not the kind of feminist that would push her to be uncomfortable in order to make my social point. I’ll go get another cup of coffee instead. 

——

Read the article. You likely can pick it up from your library’s digital magazine collection, if not from grocery checkout stands everywhere. If you don’t have your own breasts, there are people you care about who do. It’s quick, it’s real, and knowledge is power. Against the dark, if nothing else. 

    

 

  

ps: I said “two times:” the first was a GS policy/procedural question. Opened the email before any coffee (shakes head at self), read it and started answering before I got to the end. Composed the whole answer, went back to the original to make sure I’d hit all her points (I always do that)…

…and realized I’d missed several key details that made her question less of an “of course not” and more of a “well, huh-!”

Kimbol Dianne Soques — Exhibit A in the ongoing exhibition, “Object Lessons in Why Not to Pick Up Your Devices Before Breakfast.”