Benjamin Callahan

My Issue With The Commercialization of Breast Cancer

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:42:00 -0500

My mother was diagnosed today with stage three breast cancer. While it came as a shock to all of us, having no history of cancer in her family, we’re not going to let it get to us. But it brings me to the thought process of breast cancer and how all the pink ribbon bullshit is passed around.

Breast cancer affects both men and women, but it affects a very small amount of men and has an incredibly low mortality rate. So why is it that breast cancer gets all the funding, yet colon and pancreatic cancers are incredibly under-funded? You see pink ribbons on everything, cereal boxes, cars, clothes, banners, billboards. But you don’t see anything for other forms of cancer. Why is it that we pump our money into an incredibly survivable form of cancer? We do it because it largely affects women.

Corporations see breast cancer as a way to cash in on women. All the talk of breast cancer survivors inspire and empower other women to come together. You see the pink ribbon bullshit being sold everywhere to “raise awareness.” Even though you have a 70% chance of survival. And people are buying into this stuff.

I had to personally send a message to many of my family members, asking them to refrain from buying all the pink ribbon stuff, because my mother doesn’t want it, and the people behind that stuff are less than great. My mother isn’t part of a special group, she’s a woman who happened to get sick with a very treatable disease.

It’s disgraceful to me that a cancer that almost exclusively affects women gets funding, while more deadly forms of cancer are completely ignored in the funding department. Cancer runs in my dad’s side of the family, my grandfather is surviving with prostate cancer, and my uncle died of lung cancer. No one gave them ribbons of support. The thing that is the most sick is my aunt, who ignored my uncle until his death bed, has a giant pink ribbon on the back of her Lexus, because of a friend she knew at some point. Nothing for my uncle who died of a much more terminal cancer.

That’s our society. We only help those who don’t need it, because actual support is too much of a pain in the ass.

Something I Never Thought Would Be My Problem.

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 18:55:00 -0500

This is on the subject of rape. An incredibly touchy subject that will undoubtedly piss people off. Send me a message crying to me about how I’m a horrible person for what I’m about to say, or whatever you feel like doing.

So I spent a year and a half of my life being incredibly promiscuous and probably putting myself at risk for more diseases than I can name. It’s a time I’m not really ashamed of, but I’m not running around in the streets exclaiming how great I was because of it. It was fun and meaningless, at least to me it was. Enter in, the psycho-ginger known as Nicole. Nicole was a friendly enough girl, a bit two-dimensional for my tastes, but she was pretty and seemed nice enough. I won her over with my classic act of pretending to pay attention to what she had to say and complimenting her, just making sure I didn’t give out too much. We ended up hooking up and having what she described as the best night of her life.

I decided since she was fairly easy, I’d see if I could get a few more turns off of her before she wanted an actual relationship. Little did I know, that one night of passion for her, is a committed relationship. So I give her another call a few days later, we end up hooking up a few days a week for a little under a month. At this point, I decide I’m not really feeling it with her anymore, and I go off to pursue this world full of women. Enter in, the feign rape.

I take rape seriously, it happens to men and women and it’s absolutely awful. I’ve known a few girls who were raped in their life time, and most of them were unable to have relationships because of their strong distrust in men. That being said, I don’t have respect for the young women who will fake rape to spite people they don’t like, and yes, it does happen. And it’s more often than you would think, and it pretty much always fucks over the guy.

See, what happened was I get a call from Nicole’s friend Kelsey, Kelsey was the fox who I had moved on to attempting to sleep with when I was finally bored of Nicole. Because of this, Kelsey had my back like a bro. Nicole had thought I knocked her up, and freaked out trying to get Plan B. Since Nicole was only seventeen, she couldn’t get it in the state of Kansas. At this point I had just turned eighteen and was incredibly confused as to why she hadn’t asked me to get it for her. Apparently it was because I’m actually a rapist.

Cue in the army of angry teenage girls who don’t know shit about law, telling me that they’re going to get me sent to prison. (Which, for all intensive purposes, they could have, since Nicole was only seventeen, even though we were only a few months apart.) But they didn’t make this connection, they just continued to call me a rapist. I studied one year of law before I dropped out of college to work on cars and have friends. I knew I fucked up if she decided to go to any authority, just based on my age alone, even though we both had given consent.

It wasn’t just my age though, she had been telling people that I raped her. This is when I found out, that Nicole had thought we were in a relationship and was very angry about it. Her mother called me, angrily yelling at me about how she’s going to get the whole police force on my ass. To which, like any boneheaded law-student who thinks he’s better than you would respond, I came up with,

“OH YEAH? WELL MY DADDY’S A POLICE SERGEANT!”

Apparently that was enough to make her hang up. My dad is an unemployed loser who lives off social security, but no one knows what he does because no one has ever seen him. I was just trying to buy time until I could figure out what was going on. Luckily for me, Nicole just wanted to make me look bad for sleeping with her and not being attached, rather than actually get me arrested, and she came clean about this before any real authorities got involved. She never realized though that the repercussions of this, could have ruined my life. Eventually all of the heat died down, since Nicole didn’t know my last name, or where I lived, and I changed my phone number to avoid any further issues.

I heard from Kelsey later that Nicole had been institutionalized and was now on some new kind of medication. This has now forced me to pull a classic line from Rain Man and ask a girl, prior to coitus, if she is actually on any prescription medication.

Long story short, unemotional sex will have negative repercussions on very emotional women. Crazy women exist, and trust me, they will destroy you if they feel like it. Be careful fellas.

The Castration of Masculinity.

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 13:58:00 -0500

In my more recent years of being a man I have noticed many things about society that are quite alarming. The biggest thing being the newest wave of feminism. Now, I’m not one of those guys who thinks of feminists as a hate group. I do however think of them as something as insane as PETA. I don’t hate PETA either, I just think they’re completely psychotic and end up doing way more damage than good even though their hearts are in the right place.

I’m seeing stories about little boys who are dressed up as little girls to prevent “traditional gender roles.” But in those stories, it’s always a mother who has a little boy that she desperately wants to be a little girl. Dressing her little boy up in tutus and all pink, but keeping him away from skulls and the color black. That’s not breaking out of gender roles, that’s making your child a cross dresser. I often times wear a blazer with a pink button up shirt, I do this because I like the color pink and it is good on my complexion. But most important of all, it’s my choice. This is a child who just does whatever his mother says, and his mother is keeping him from making a choice that would make him seem like a man. She gives him dolls and pink clothes, and heavily weighs on him dressing in that manner.

When I was 16 I decided I wanted to wear a tutu, because I felt like it and I’m very secure in my masculinity. But we live in a society where men can’t openly have feelings, where they are forced to oppress anything that might make them too manly. And that’s not right, men are growing up with more problems put on them. Let men be men without castrating them for being men. Let a man stand up to take a piss, and if a man wants to cry, let him cry. Don’t demonize a man who enjoys having sex with multiple women without emotion, because lots of women don’t want to be demonized for the same thing. It’s cunty.

If you dress your child up like a ballerina and don’t let him dress like a hockey player, you’re a cunt. You’re a cunt if you demonize a man for having lots and lots of sex. You’re a cunt if you tell men they should piss sitting down. If I want to be who I am, let it be my choice. Don’t call me a misogynist because I think you’re an idiot for pushing your standards on me.