On the Men’s Rights subreddit yesterday, I found this inspiring report from the front lines of the Men’s Rights struggle — the struggle of MRAs to annoy pretty much everyone they ever talk to.
Yes, it is of course true that some men get breast cancer. I’m pretty sure, though, that yelling at breast cancer fundraisers isn’t the best way to help these men.
Ellesar: He was playing deliberate games with statistics (something we frequently see when they discuss rape, too). Specifically, he was talking about the fact that men, once diagnosed, are more likely to die from the disease. As others here noted, that’s because the disease itself is so rare in men that it gets diagnosed much later–and late diagnosis is possibly one of the biggest determiners of mortality rate. The fact that the population of “men diagnosed with breast cancer” is literally one percent of “women diagnosed with breast cancer” isn’t something he wants to include in his odious little screed, because it would make it apparent that he’s dealing with a fringe case.
I want to note that the statistics on breast cancer survival are skewed by early diagnosis. A lot of cancers resolve on their own, because your immune system isn’t invariably dysfunctional. When a lot of cancers are diagnosed at extremely early stages, a lot would have resolved without treatment. Then they resolve after treatment (or during watchful waiting) and are counted as though diagnosis/treatment helped.
I’m not saying that diagnosis and treatment are bad things. I’m saying that the statistics about cancer are misleading if they don’t correct for this problem (and most do not). The statistics for male breast cancer don’t have this skew, because male breast cancer is not aggressively diagnosed at very early stages and then treated the way female breast cancer is, so comparing the two is comparing apples to apple blossoms.
Ha. Seems like she’s familiar with his type. She skipped surprise and went straight to hanging up.
Freemage – but the stats are clear – men (in England anyway) are MUCH more likely to survive, later diagnosis or not.
That’s mostly because when doctors study the human body (and this stretches back super far in history), it’s always been a cisgendered white dude.
Those would always be the bodies who were donated (or sometimes stolen) for science.
The problem is, we’ve never bothered to correct ourselves because we consider doctors and the accompanying science, to be correct all the time, and we hardly leave room for bias or just straight up ignorance.