Mutilation with your Coffee Ma'am?
In the past only religious saints were celebrated for having their breasts cut off. Now brands like Burberry and Costa have embraced magical thinking and terrible science to glorify mutilation.
Costa Coffee has slowly driven into a car crash. If we’re lucky the only victim will be its share price.
It decorated its mobile coffee vans in Brighton and Hove with an image of a surfing young woman who just happened to have had a double mastectomy.
She’s so cool she can even surf while wielding a coffee cup.
When challenged the company argued the image came from a mural featured outside one of their coffee shops that celebrated inclusion of all sorts. But this imagery is not what we normally think of as ….inclusion. That usually refers to accommodating people as they are. We don’t include the disabled, say, by insisting they should have surgery to look or become more “abled”. If a company used images of larger size women celebrating the fact they were getting their stomach stapled or having liposuction, they’d be panned.
Double mastectomies are complex and dangerous forms of surgery. Indeed all surgery is dangerous. Has anyone forgotten Leslie Ash’s trout pout, the result of “routine” lip fillers? And that’s just an injection. Or Kanye West’s mum, Donda, killed with a “routine” tummy tuck and breast lift?
I’ve filmed enough operations from cosmetic surgery to life-saving heart bypasses to say with total certainty that no one should ever go under the surgeon’s knife if they can avoid it. You may never fully appreciate the chaos, contingency and close-run disasters in a busy hospital schedule until you are inside an operating theatre watching surgery unfold, as the team listens to heavy rock, sings along to their favourite track and argues about a football match or a movie, all the while cheerfully carving into someone.
In 2011-22 alone the NHS admitted that 291 patients went home after an operation with a parting gift from their surgeon, a foreign object sewn inside them. Usually it was a swab or gauze but some lucky individuals got full scalpels and even a drill bit.
Yet here’s Burberry celebrating double mastectomy surgery as part of its 2023 Valentine’s Day campaign, B:MINE. It’s tag line was not …get your healthy breasts removed …and find a partner, but it might as well have been.
