Women are not objects.

For some reason, I woke up thinking about Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" comment, and it was a short hop from thinking I can't believe he said that to Why is that so incredibly offensive? Then it clicked.

Romney was talking about working to get women more involved in politics. This is essentially a good thing, because women are grossly underrepresented in politics. I think there are maybe some issues in the overall methodology, because sometimes men working to help women isn't the best way of doing it, but that's all little issues on the side. More women in politics? Great. So they're trying to get women into politics, and someone brings Mr. Romney binders full of them.

I have a binder full of paper within arm's reach right now. Notes on a chemistry course, if you're curious. I know people who have other binders full of paper. Or of baseball cards. Maybe some 90's diehards have binders full of pogs. Whatever. The point is: we have binders full of things, and women are not things.

They brought Romney binders full of women to potentially fill important positions and in doing so reduced these women to objects used to fill a vacancy, rather than qualified people looking for jobs. You have binders full of resumes, not of the people themselves, because people aren't things.

There's a lot of overlap here with something else that has been bugging the crap out of me: breast cancer awareness month. It's October, and you may have noticed a plethora of pink, everywhere. Pink for the cure. Pink for awareness. This bugs the crap out of me for a couple reasons, not least because profiting from the nebulous idea of cancer awareness is gross. You want to cure cancer? Let's talk about increasing funding to Planned Parenthood, where they very routinely screen for both cervical and breast cancer (and, for that matter, administer the HPV vaccine, which can prevent cancer).

But here's the other thing: things like Save the Ta-Tas. Things like the t-shirt I've seen a picture of saying "Save Second Base".

Breast cancer is not about breasts. It is, obviously, a cancer that begins in breast tissue. But it does not affect only breasts, because 99% of the time those breasts are part of a woman, who is a human being.

My grandmother had breast cancer. She survived. She survived a lot of things and passed away last year at the age of 90. Obviously, yes, I'm sure she had some cosmetic concerns about the surgery to remove the cancer, but you know what? She was a hell of a lot more concerned with saving her life than with saving her breasts. This is because my grandmother, like every woman, was a whole person who was more than the sum of her anatomical parts. She was still a whole, complete person after breast cancer, because she was considerably more than a pair of breasts. She was a chef and a baker and a gardener. She loved shopping and she traveled the world and she made sure she always had sugary cereal for the visiting grandkids. My grandmother, in short, was a person. She happened to be a person with two X chromosomes and a person who had a significant percentage of her breast tissue removed, but she was still a real person.

My grandmother would not fit in one of Mitt Romney's binders, because she was a person. The doctors did not successfully save her boobies, but they saved her life.

We need, as a culture, to stop treating women as if we are items. Getting women into politics matters not because you must have so many of Type X widgets in order to fill the quota, but because women are people who make up 50% of the population. We need to fight breast cancer not because it destroys breasts but because it kills women (and, occasionally, men). We can't continue to define women by their parts or by their otherness to men, because that assumes men are the norm.