Saturday, December 13, 2008

Obama Smoking in a World of One-Breasted Women

Two stories that fetched headlines in today's newspaper--which I actually was able to read because David took the kids to go visit his grandmother--has me thinking about the way we in modern life relate to the body. First, a story about a new breast cancer test that can more accurately predict who will be stricken with the disease. Second, a story about President-elect Barack Obama's smoking habit, and how his plight to kick the butt will be followed closely by anti-smoking groups.

Back in graduate school, I studied a particular vein of folklore known as bodylore. In a nutshell, it encompasses how people experience the meaning of their bodies in public and private life. Watch the news or read the paper, and you'll discover many statements about how today's Americans interact with their bodies. There is contradiction, of course. We love and hate our carcasses in balanced measure most of the time. We long to yield to ecstasy, at the same time mistrusting our limbs and organs, sure they will betray us at any time.

Take the story on breast cancer testing. Are we really prepared for a test that will tell us if, sometime down the road, our breasts will turn on us? I can imagine legions of women lobbing off their breasts, breasts that, in many cases, have never been used to nurse a baby because of the shift toward sexualization and shame surrounding this precious part of a woman's anatomy. I can definitely envision--frightening as it might sound--a time when breasts are considered unessential and take off the moment they begin to bud so that the woman can be safe. We'll reconstruct them, of course, so that they can still be pleasure pillows. But they'll be tamed, ineffective, and not the ticking time bombs the tests will tell us they are. The same kind of thing happens with childbirth. For most women, childbirth is a safe, completely wonderful experience. But now we have moved it to the hospital because we all know that it is really a crisis just waiting to happen. In the end, modern thinking often says, no matter how much we love them, our bodies will bring us down.

Now to the story about Obama and his smoking. I had no idea Barack Obama was or is a smoker. But now that he is about to become president, nothing, not even his body, is his own. He belongs to us now. I had the same reaction when John McCain released his 400-page medical record tome. In truth, we prefer our leaders to be more machine than man. If we could, we'd have a Web cam zoomed in on Obama's lungs, stomach lining, and carpuscles. Because, the thinking goes, his vulnerability is our vulnerability. We'll still shower our children with images of movie and TV characters lighting up because those aren't real bodies. Tobacco lobbiests in Washington will still have a helluva lot of power. But that man in the White House had better not light up.

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