Behind the pink: @Anniepalooza on how #BethWhaanga wears her breast cancer

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By Annette Healey

14th February 2014

We’ve all seen them: those photos of Beth Whaanga, posted on Facebook, the ones that prompted 100 people to unfriend her, branding the pictures ‘disgusting’.

In the first photo, Beth looks a knockout: bright red dress, immaculate hair and makeup, a very attractive woman with a lovely figure.

In the following photos, shown in black and white, Beth, still with immaculate hair and makeup, has stripped down to her knickers and is showing the world what her body looks like after breast cancer and her subsequent breast reconstruction operation.

These images are not disgusting but they are confronting. Very confronting.

Why?

UnknownBecause the truth of breast cancer, as depicted on the battleground of this young woman’s body, doesn’t match the public image of breast cancer that we see in the media.

Where are the middle-aged men and women in curly pink wigs, shown laughing and chatting with friends as they walk to raise money for the ’cause’?

Where is the advertisement showing women that all they need to get through cancer and feel better about themselves is to apply some lipstick and find a flattering wig?

After all, we shouldn’t let a little cancer get in the way of our beauty routine and ability to get on with things.

Where is that product, now available in pink, that allows us to buy it, knowing we are helping ‘such a worthy cause’?

By challenging our perception of breast cancer and the effects of treatment on her body, Beth is showing us the real story behind the pink.

Of course, what can’t be shown in those photos are some of the other effects of treatment, equally as confronting as the scarring but rarely, if ever, mentioned.

I can’t speak for Beth, only my own experience, but I’m sure the side effects of treatment are reasonably universal. The vomiting, the diarrhoea (oh the diarrhoea!) the oral thrush that makes everything taste like it has been encased in cotton wool, exhaustion, and burns to your skin from radiation.

None of these side effects are pretty and none can be made any more palatable by the addition of pink.

By all means, look at those photographs and turn away muttering “disgusting”, but only if you’re referring to the disease that has caused such devastation.

Beth, I take my hat off to you, not only for being brave enough to have these pictures taken and published but for having the sheer guts and determination to show the real breast cancer story.

I think you’re gorgeous.


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Comments


  1. Some people are blind to the truth.Bravo Beth,some people do live for the truth.


  2. I agree. Another interesting incident was when Face Book removed the Scar Project photos because they were obscene. The Scar project is a photographic record of women living with breast cancer & breast cancer treatment.
    http://www.thescarproject.org/

    I am posting as someone who has spent the last year & half with breast cancer. I have had chemo, radio and a double mastectomy and am expected to have reconstruction this year which will take up to 14months to complete with a 4month post op recovery period immediately after reconstruction. I don’t really want to go through another brutal treatment but the expectation from everyone – meds, friends, people I walk past on the street who I will never see again – is I need to restore my body to their perception of a ‘normal body”.

    Fuck that.


  3. You would have to be a wonderful person Beth, brave, intelligent, and very caring, our perception
    of beauty is only as long as our noses, true beauty involves an intelligence far beyond what most people
    on this planet have. Thank you Beth.

  4. Eva Makowiecki says

    I’m not sure Annette why you felt the need to put down the ‘pink’ initiatives – which never pretend to be an answer to having cancer. The only people you should attack are the appallingly small minded and delusional people who think disease is ugly and they simply shouldn’t have to be confronted by it. Their delusions will be shattered soon enough when they get sick – and they will. They had better hope they are not surrounded by people like themselves, who think that the suffering of having to look at a sick or scarred person is greater than the suffering of that person. Narcissism at its most pathetic.

    I think Beth Whaanga is an outstanding person, and clearly has much more to offer the world than those pathetic losers who felt the need to ‘unfriend’ her, or who find the images in some way wrong. I bet they would get a nasty shock if they realised that any rational person would consider them to be utterly worthless specimens of humanity? I do hope they have some redeeming features, but I’m not hopeful.


  5. @R_Chirgwin I’m clearly not a writer… http://t.co/fMgMGHEhCt


  6. .@Anniepalooza Actually, I think it’s a fine piece. Don’t talk it down: http://t.co/G3nHXgmmJs