Battle Scars

Twistyfaster has given her blog the wonderfully mischievious name "I Blame Patriarchy". She also recently had a radical mastectomy for breast cancer, and I am linking to a picture of her scar here. You can choose not to look at it, of course, but I find a fierce beauty in it. This is a woman who has done battle, and she is standing up and showing us the scars, the scars of twenty-first century medicine. There is something heroic about it, and not only because Twisty took the picture so soon after major surgery.

Pictures of women's breasts are ubiquitous on the net, so ubiquitous that they have almost taken a life of their own, as something separate from women. As playthings. Twisty's picture reminds us that they are part of the woman, and that it is the woman who really matters.