This popped up a few times in my Facebook feed yesterday, almost always accompanied by expletives we don’t usually use at Women’s Agenda
It’s a fairly common trope on a slow news day, the latest thing science has discovered that might increase your risk of cancer. This list of 116 things that give you cancer includes bacon, hair dyes, shoe polish, roasted red meat, not having a twin, having breasts or testicles and shaving your armpits. I suppose you could just work your way through it every time you’ve got a gap in your publishing schedule and be sure of at least some clicks and shares.
As demonstrated by the accompanying most read articles:
It’s not a joke, like almost everyone else in Australia, people I love have had cancer, it’s terrifying. And all the more so because cancer is the last disease that western medicine doesn’t fully understand and can’t cure.
But the one thing I learned from it was that life is short, too short to waste it being afraid to do the things that bring joy, comfort and connections with other people.
Also, there is increased risk of things like smoking tobacco, which has no safe level of use, and increased risk from roast potatoes, which is almost meaningless for the way most people eat roast potatoes.
“Increased risk” doesn’t mean that if you were to spend the afternoon having your hair done before shaving your pits and heading out for a lamb roast and a nice cab sav, you’re going to wake up in the morning with cancer. It means don’t burn potatoes to charcoal and eat them for breakfast lunch and dinner every day, because that might give you cancer. Or scurvy.
Ischemic heart disease is actually one of the leading causes of death around the world and causes more preventable death in Australia than anything else. Not as much fun in a headline though (plus, it’s much harder to spell).
Again, this is not a joke about the people who suffer from these illnesses, it’s a comment on the way media uses fear to make headlines and the effect such headlines have on how we live our lives.
Crime is another great fear headline. We’ve published many articles about the way stranger attacks on women are manipulated to create unjustified fear. Women are in the most danger in their homes from people they know, but truth and sensationalism don’t work well together.
Police crime stats are almost always misused in headlines: Crime waves! Increasing crime rates! Danger! Danger! DANGER!
When the truth is that crime rates have stayed relatively stable (or actually decreased) in most states in Australia for years, and most crimes are not crimes against the person.
Terrorism has become another fear clickbait favourite. Muslims are coming to steal our jobs and blow up our babies, when the truth is that we are far more likely to die doing home renovations or using a vending machine than from extremist Islamic terrorists.
And all these things matter, how we live our lives, the anxiety fear headlines create changes our view of the world.
Fear is why people attack veiled Muslim women (and seriously, why is it women they attack? What’s that about?) on trains and buses. It’s why our government can brutalising children in off-shore camps and know the majority of the population won’t object. It distorts our perception of the life we can have in favour of a more restricted life we don’t need to have.
Fear of others that, with hindsight, we can clearly see was irrational and created more harm than it protected us from, is not new.
US Jan 20 ’39: Should the US government permit 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children to come in from Germany? pic.twitter.com/5cFs5RabQn
— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) November 17, 2015
We’re all going to die of something, even non-smoking, non-drinking, vegan marathon runners are going to die eventually. We can do things to sensibly mitigate risk – like giving up smoking – but we can’t prevent death, and being afraid of everything leave no room for joy.
The occasional glass of wine, leisurely weekend brunch of bacon and eggs, an afternoon playing cricket on the beach, strolling home at 9 o’clock on a summer evening after a steak dinner, neighbours who fled the horrors of Syria, or a side of roast potatoes with a Sunday lunch are not as risky as feeling constant fear about things we shouldn’t be afraid of.
Life in Australia is pretty damn good, that might not be a headline grabber, but it’s true.
Here’s my suggestion for a better headlines:
