“Angelina in a new cut”: this is how, somewhat provocatively, our journalist Anne-Laure Gannack reacted to Angelina Jolie’s column in the New York Times. On Tuesday, May 14, the actress announced that she had undergone a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer. Admiration, disgust, anxiety, hope… Why did this news cause such a storm of emotions?
“I am not going to touch on the personality of the actress, nor challenge the medical feasibility of her choice. Let us leave the first to psychologists who are not burdened with remorse, and the second to oncologists. If I’m responding to this front-page column in the New York Times (not anywhere!), it’s because the news seems to me to cause great dismay. And it would be interesting to ask yourself why.
First of all, of course, because of the absence of any modesty. Angelina Jolie is not content with putting her mother, children, and husband on public display; she also opens her nipples, milk ducts, ovaries, bruises on her chest, terrible pain before us … Downright porn trash — much more, except to attach an anatomical picture of a beauty in a section.
ego question
This lack of modesty, of course, is not without reason. The purpose of such boundless realism is to shock, and not just for the sake of provocation and the worldwide attention that this provocation attracts, but in order to convince other women to follow the stellar example. And this is what confuses, perhaps even more: an ego that spreads to the whole world, the desire to set oneself up as a model — and present one’s husband as a model of a husband, one’s children as a model of children, one’s mother as a model of a mother … Although the mother , in the end, was not such a good mother: otherwise she would have done a mastectomy herself.
Ideal mother
A truly correct mother is Angelina. A mother for whom giving of herself and sacrificing herself are not just words: she really gives a part of her body in order to give her children the chance to live with her as long as possible. More recently, the neuropsychologist Boris Cyrulnik told me that a dead mother is the ideal mother; to this Angelina objects that the ideal mother is an immortal mother. Or, at least, a mother endowed with such power that the disease cannot nest in her. “Mom, will you promise me that you won’t die?” Where we all embarrassedly respond, «I’m sorry, but I can’t promise you that,» Angelina states that yes, we can actually reassure our children about this. It remains only to remove the problematic ovaries, and everything will be under control.
Absolute control
This is all the more embarrassing because we ourselves are terribly eager to believe it. Believe that medicine can do anything. To believe that risk assessments are just numbers that need to be lowered with the movement of a scalpel. To believe that preventive measures and principles of prevention will finally eradicate the disease. To believe that the body is a machine in which if something is rusty, then it is enough to replace the necessary part. To believe that a prosthesis is just as good an organ as any other… We want to believe this not out of crazy optimism, but because that is what our science-worshipping, risk-assessing, super-preventive era teaches us. We, the children of haughty rationalism, are surrounded from the cradle by ideals of absolute control.
Bravery
And thanks to Angelina’s column, we discover the magnificent face of the woman of tomorrow: one that medicine saves even before the onset of the disease, and prostheses make it even more feminine. However, it should be added to this a fair dose of courage, which also makes her an ideal mother. After all, you have to decide on the operation, go of your own free will, lie on the operating table so that the surgeon cuts off the breasts, which are still quite healthy … Which, to be honest, only adds discomfort when reading Angelina’s column. And the feeling of discomfort is mixed with admiration, disgust, anxiety … and hope.