This week in our office, Arthur reporter Matt Jarvis and I had a lively discussion about Movember’s relative virtues. Jarvis spoke emphatically to me about how lots of people, himself included, have strong personal reasons to advocate for cancer awareness, especially about preventative care and early diagnosis.
I can agree with that: encouraging healthy habits is a cause worth supporting. Still, I have my doubts about how cancer “awareness” campaigns are gendered and marketed.
A large portion of the money raised by Movember goes to Prostate Cancer Canada, which is funding some extremely worthwhile initiatives, but some of this cash goes back to Movember itself, which seems to be paying largely for slick graphic design and gimmicky branded merchandise.
While I don’t want to minimize the importance of cancer research, I have my doubts about whether Movember is the best vehicle for a men’s health movement. Though popular, “moustache awareness” has been marketed so strongly that the causes it stands for can seem like an afterthought.
If you look hard enough on the Movember website, past the ads for beer, motorcycles, and razors, you’ll find that the campaign encourages men to get physical exams, eat healthier diets, stop smoking, and drink in moderation. But rather than using their marketing dollars to make it cool for men to eat salads, the Movember website unhelpfully tells you the volume of beer that a one-month old moustache can absorb.
And there are other issues, too. For instance:
It doesn’t talk about access. Movember imagines that men don’t go to doctors because they “just can’t fit it into their schedule.” The campaign assumes that the largest barrier to health care access is men’s reluctance. This ignores other significant factors, like the availability of healthcare or insurance coverage; the ability to see a queer or trans-positive healthcare practitioner; the ability to access healthcare in your first language, or if you work a night shift, or a variety of other reasons including the accessibility and affordability of healthy foods.
It’s cisnormative. Movember’s prostate cancer focus has expanded to encompass “men’s health awareness” generally. Still, not all men have prostates. Cervical cancer is also a “men’s health” issue –checkitoutguys.ca does an awesome job of providing info for trans guys who need paps. There are also lots of guys – trans and cis alike – who can’t grow facial hair, but that doesn’t make them less manly.
It’s heteronormative. The moustache plays a huge role in queer style and iconography, but Movember’s celebrity Hall of Fame is super straight (Dr. Phil, Mr. Potato Head, Ned Flanders, Ron Jeremy), except for Freddie Mercury. Where’s John Waters? Tom of Finland pinups? Le Tigre’s JD Samson?
The Movember campaign also explicitly argues that moustaches are sexy, without ever acknowledging queer sexualities and relationships. The website’s “Mo Facts” include statements like “Women are more attracted to men with Mo’s.”
This absence is especially conspicuous in a campaign that focuses on prostates. If the aim is to get men to get annual physical exams, it would be especially useful to lessen the perception that someone’s finger in your ass (whether that finger is your doctor’s or your lover’s) is an experience to be avoided. No homo, right bros?
It misses opportunities to debunk sexist ideology. The idea that only men have moustaches is propped up by a lot of sexist marketing and patriarchal bullshit. Ask any woman who has bleached, shaved, waxed, or lasered her face – or who has felt pressure to do so. Women with facial hair have been displayed as “freaks” in circuses. Movember dismissingly mentions that “some Eastern European” women have moustaches, which is a harmful stereotype in itself. Check out J. Bee’s “Femme a Barbe” zine for more on women & other bearded gender outlaws.
Movember (somewhat defensively) states that men are “indifferent” to their health and need to step up their game to catch up with the “women’s health movement”. Of course, the underfunding of necessary programs or research relating to anyone’s health is a situation that should be improved.
Still, the framing of this conversation leaves out larger discussions about gender and healthcare that would likely be more effective than the “men are scared of hospitals” model that Movember uses. There is a “women’s health movement” because historically, women weren’t included in medical studies and so research regarding their health was underdeveloped. For instance, the symptoms of a heart attack are different for cis women than cis men.
As well, women’s bodies are often pathologized as unwell and treated as public. Women are pathologized as being sick even when the symptoms are often due to their social location – we don’t have “hysteria” anymore, but we do have similar stigma about shit like PMS. Men, especially typically masculine, macho, “bros” like the ones targeted by Movember, are thought to be by definition healthy and normal. It’s good that Movember aims to discourage the “it’ll all be alright” attitude, but it seems unlikely to be effective without also critiquing the “bro” stereotype.
It centres white dudes. When Jarvis was on campus scouting for Mo Bros, he told us that after hours of looking, he found an overwhelming number of participating white guys and very few POC participants. The official Movember website is similarly problematic, though they do sell licensed Snoop Dogg t-shirts.
It leaves out environmental factors. Healthy lifestyles are important, but can only do so much. Curing cancer for good will likely involve pressuring governments for better environmental regulations that limit the use and exposure of carcinogens beyond what individuals can do on their own.
