Apparently the idea of vaccinating boys against HPV is a tad controversial — even though the vaccine is already approved for girls.
At issue is the fact that HPV is a major risk factor for cervical cancer, which women can get but boys can’t. So parents are wondering why they have to vaccinate their boys for a “girl’s disease.” What the article doesn’t get to until halfway down the second page is that the strains of HPV prevented by Gardasil are the ones that cause genital warts, penile cancer and anal cancer — and I’m relatively confident that boys can get all of those. But that doesn’t stop the reporter from writing an entirely sexist, condescending and obnoxious hit piece about vaccinating boys against HPV:
HOW cool are those Gardasil Girls? Riding horses, flinging softballs, bashing away on drum sets: on the television commercials, they are pugnacious and utterly winning. They want to be “One Less,” they chant — one less victim of cervical cancer. Get vaccinated with Gardasil, they urge their sisters. Protect yourselves against the human papillomavirus, or H.P.V., which causes cervical cancer.
But someone’s missing from this grrlpower tableau.
Ah, that would be Gardasil Boy.
Has Jan Hoffman never seen a pharmaceutical commercial in his/her life? They all show shiny happy people going kayak or mountain-climbing or doing whatever else they couldn’t do before they had medicine to treat genital herpes / arthritis / heart disease / whatever. That’s the schtick. Although I suppose it’s more fun to mock the “Gardasil Girl” than it is to deal with the actual issues; and it’s more interesting to paint a picture of a controversial vaccine than to recognize that most people are a-ok with preventing cancer.
I understand the hesitancy to give your kids a new vaccine. I haven’t gotten the HPV vaccine largely because I can’t afford it and it’s not covered by my insurance, but I’ve certainly weighed the potential risks of getting injected with a relatively new product, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me nervous. That said, I tend to be personally averse to medical treatment in general, so it’s more a weird individual thing about me being a paranoid scaredy-cat than it is about Gardasil. And at the end of the day, watching more than one friend go through HPV-related health problems has convinced me that the vaccine is the way to go.
Point being, I understand parents’ hesitancy. But vaccines aren’t just about your own personal health — they’re about public health. And that understanding is missing in this piece.
Thankfully, a few parents seem to get it:
That’s good enough for some mothers. “If there was a vaccine I could take that would get rid of prostate cancer, why wouldn’t I?” said Lisa Lippman, a Manhattan real estate broker with three sons. “If there was a vaccine that sons could get that would get rid of breast cancer, most parents wouldn’t hesitate. But cervical cancer is the ‘sex cancer.’ ”
Unfortunately, the reporter doesn’t — and s/he plays right into sexist stereotypes by only talking to mothers, as if moms are the only family members who care about their children’s health.
The article is kind of infuriating, but this quote was my absolute favorite:
A few prescient pediatricians are already laying a foundation. The other day, during Cathy Anderson’s 11-year-old son’s annual check-up, the pediatrician mentioned that Gardasil might become available for boys.
“He talked about taking responsibility for controlling a communicable disease,” said Mrs. Anderson, a stay-at-home mother in West Lafayette, Ind. “My first reaction was: ‘Well, that makes sense.’ Then I told my son he wouldn’t have to worry about the disease, because he wouldn’t be having sex until he’d been married for a long time.”
So now you don’t just have to wait until you’re married, you have to wait until you’ve been married for a long time. Beautiful.
Lots of diseases disproportionately affect one community or another. But when those diseases are deadly, and when we find a way to prevent them, we do. This isn’t about “vaccinating boys for girls’ sake;” this is about a public health issue that we need to nip in the bud. And the fact that “lots of women die of this disease and almost all of them get it from men” isn’t enough reason to vaccinate boys too is a pretty good indicator of just how misogynist and backwards our society can be.
Finally, why the fuck is this article in the Styles section?