Sex Education

When I was in Junior High there was a popular song called “Get Yourself a College Girl”. The boppy, beach-boy lyric went like this: “”Get yourself a college girl, a well-read book, a knowledge girl. Get yourself a coll-edge girl.”

I hummed that song all the time—maybe thinking it was affirmation that skinny but smart girls like me could be just as desirable as my classmate Bethany Springer, who started wearing a bra in Grade Six.

Now I am reading the new book, The Social Animal, by New York Times columnist, David Brooks and last night my eyes were opened by this paragraph:

“Men want to do the same sexual acts regardless of education levels, but female sexual preferences differ by education, culture and status level. Highly educated women are much more likely to perform oral sex, engage in same-sex activity and experiment with a variety of other activities than less-educated women. Religious women are less adventurous than nonreligious women, though the desires of religious men are not much different than those of secular ones.”

I guess a little learning goes—and comes—a long way.

Put Away the Pink

Ladies please. Put away the pink and get out the red. October’s pink boob month would have all of us convinced that we are within minutes of dying of breast cancer. Not the case. Not even close. Breast cancer is no picnic but even though some people die it’s not likely to be your killer.

What is very likely to kill you is your heart and cardiovascular system.

Read this and tell your friends: The NUMBER ONE killer of women is Heart Disease.

Read this too: More women die of cardiovascular disease than the next five causes of death combined, including all forms of cancer.

Saddest fact: Less than 50% of women know that heart disease is our biggest killer. We are so swept away by the pink propaganda of breast cancer that we are dying from marketing and fear. That makes us real boobs.

Pink Ribbons vs Reality

Oh it’s pink frenzy time again. Breast cancer awareness as corporate communication. You just know that half of the companies with pink ribbon promotions don’t give employees leave time to get mammograms or provide adequate family leave time for a caregiver to help someone with cancer. It’s a sales promotion with pretty pink pretend ad copy.

Wouldn’t a real commitment to breast cancer awareness be something like giving all women in a company two extra hours “Pink” leave each year to get a check-up or take any measures for her health. That I could almost swallow.

But the real service to women would be to tell them where the real risks hide rather than scare and distract them with pink shoes, and pink shirts and pink cupcakes.

Heart and lung. CPR. Cardio Pulmonary Reality.

Women Writing About Women

“If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same thing, he’s describing the human condition.”

That’s from Emily Gould in the May 3 New York Magazine. Gould’s new book, “And the Heart Says Whatever” will be published this week. Her statement hits home as I struggle to write about cancer and caregiving and love and sex –and work and clothes and money and fear and thinking and therapy and food and writing.

Is it one woman’s story and/or the human condition?

Colonel Chicken Cares about Your Breasts but not Your Life

More pink madness. More marketing fear.

Does the American Cancer Society care about heart disease? Does the Heart Association care about diabetes? Does Liver care about Lung? Does Chrohn’s and Colitis care about strokes? Does anyone care about all of you?

Our health care, health research and health education have become so fragmented because of marketing—and money—that it seems as if no one cares if you live or die they just want the organs they care about to survive. You can go ahead and die, they seem to say, as long as you don’t die of OUR disease.

A current ad campaign by Kentucky Fried Chicken is pitching a special promotion for fried chicken and The Susan B. Komen Foundation. You can now buy a big pink bucket (a bucket!) of fried chicken for the woman in your life and 50 cents from each big pink bucket of FRIED chicken will go to breast cancer research.

This makes me crazy! Does anyone want breast cancer? Nope. Do we want to prevent deaths from breast cancer? Yep. But this fried chicken campaign begs me to ask The Colonel—and Susan B. Komen: Do you really care about women’s lives and their health or only about breasts (both women and chicken)?

Here’s a fast bit of women’s health research: More women—more by far—die of heart disease than breast cancer. More women will die of cardiac related disease than breast or any other cancer. So if you really want to promote women’s health do you want to encourage us to eat buckets of FRIED chicken? (We know that you think we are babies—all that pink crap we have to endure, but you also think we’re stupid and can’t Google the words: breast cancer versus heart disease.)

What’s next? How about some pink Marlboro smokes? Pink Absolut vodka shots? A gallon of pink Hagen Das Ice cream and pink Wise potato chips consumed on a big pink couch in front of a pink TV?

Come on Susan B. Komen, get some balls—or are you leaving that to The Lance Armstrong Foundation? Will one of these health charities have the courage and integrity to care about the whole woman? To say to women—and the market-:A whole woman has boobs and brains and a heart and lungs and we need to take care of all of it for good health and a good life.