by Joan Ryan

BARBARA EHRENREICH'S hair has grown back in unmanageable curls, a revelation for a middle-aged woman who, until last year, couldn't have teased a wave from her hair if she'd plunged her head into a Mixmaster.

The hair is now the only physical sign of Ehrenreich's recent bout with breast cancer.

Well, the hair and the eye-popping essay in this month's Harper's magazine.

Ehrenreich, the former Time magazine columnist and author most recently of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," blasts what she describes as the pink-ribboned, teddy-beared, feel-good cult that has turned the horrible disease of breast cancer into some kind of a transformative rite of passage that offers women spiritual upward mobility and endless opportunities for self-improvement.

"So pervasive is the perkiness of the breast cancer world," she writes, "that unhappiness requires a kind of apology."

I wolfed down the essay like popcorn, though not because I necessarily agree with Ehrenreich -- who knows if I would be as offended as she by the fluffy kitsch and smiley-face attitudes if I were stricken? I loved the piece because she said the unsayable.

In these super-sensitive times when we navigate conversations as if tip-toeing across a floor of puppies, such unrepentant candor -- about anything! -- stands out like red chiffon at a convent.

"So far I've gotten positive responses -- 'Oh, thank goodness somebody finally said it' -- but I'm waiting for the hate mail, too," she said over iced coffee in a cafe near the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Ehrenreich, who has a Ph.D. in cell biology, is in Berkeley teaching a five-week course on essay writing and another in sociology.

When she was diagnosed, her primary emotion was of righteous anger. She hated that the existing treatments caused horrible nausea, hair loss, disfigurement, shattered sexual confidence, lost time at work.

She found that while the richest and most mainstream breast-cancer organizations looked for "the cure," they weren't spending much time or money unmasking environmental causes of the disease. Hooking up with environmental activists might chase away corporate donations. AstraZeneca, for example, sponsored Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Until a reorganization in 2000, this company was also a leading producer of pesticides, Ehrenreich writes, including acetochlor, classified by the EPA as a "probable human carcinogen."

This led the Cancer Prevention Coalition to condemn Breast Cancer Awareness Month as "a public relations invention by a major polluter which puts women in the position of being unwitting allies of the very people who make them sick."

As for the corporations, Ehrenreich writes, involvement in the breast cancer effort is a way of appealing to the middle-aged female market "without being feminist."

As an experiment, Ehrenreich posted a statement on one of the many breast-cancer Web sites. She listed her complaints about treatments, insurance companies, environmental carcinogens and "sappy pink ribbons." She received a chorus of rebukes.

"You need to run, not walk, to some counseling. . .I ask everyone on this site to pray for you so you can enjoy life to the fullest," wrote one respondent.

Many women who have suffered through the disease, Ehrenreich said, don't see how "you can get through the treatment experience without convincing yourself it's a makeover."

"The potential harm in all this," she said, "is the intolerance of the human variance of emotion. You're slapped down, if you express anger. There's something wrong with that."

For her, breast cancer will never be a source of identity or pride. It is an abomination that cannot be tied up nicely in a pink ribbon.

"I know this much," she writes. "I will not go into that last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm."

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

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