An AI-generated breast cancer advertisement currently haunting the Delhi Metro makes one thing perfectly clear: we’ll accept literal machines shaping discourse before we can accept the word “breast” in public conversation.
The ad—issued in public interest by YouWeCan, former cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s cancer foundation—has managed to rile people up in several ways. First off, it’s an insult to aesthetic literacy. But even if you disregard the bizarre visual, barely intelligible AI slop of women in a bus next to a mound of oranges, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that someone—a human, presumably—thought “check your oranges” was an apt line for a breast cancer awareness poster. Someone checked it, someone approved it, someone put marketing might behind it, and not one of those people paused to think that breast cancer awareness could benefit from using the word “breast”.
In the organisation’s own estimation, the use of oranges is a “bold creative choice”. But — and hear me out — maybe a bolder creative choice would have been to hire an actual photographer and copywriter to do the job. In what I assume is a misguided attempt to be culturally sensitive, the campaign manages to be deeply infantilising of the demographic it aims to educate.
The future is here, ladies, but ideas about our health are still stuck in the past. This isn’t just a solitary tech misfire. This prudish pirouette around women’s bodies—reducing a life-threatening condition to a cutesy euphemism—is emblematic of how women’s health is persistently trivialised in India, even by those who claim to champion it.
Maybe, in a circuitous way, the ad achieved its objective by fuelling this outrage cycle; after all, any publicity is good publicity. But this coyness around women’s health, stemming from shame about our bodies, has real, devastating consequences for many women. In a country where even cancer foundations tiptoe around naming body parts, women routinely find their very real medical concerns dismissed, minimised, or buried under the rotting debris of cultural taboo. And only women pay for these fundamental fiascos through compromised access to basic healthcare, our bodily autonomy, and sometimes, our lives.
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Breast cancer ad—dismissal is democratic
Medical misogyny in India begins even before birth—if you’re lucky enough to be born at all in a country with a shameful legacy of female foeticide. For those who make it, the healthcare system’s dismissal of women’s concerns becomes a lifelong companion, crossing barriers of class, caste, and geography. Yes, urban, educated, upper-class women might have better access to healthcare than their rural counterparts, but the dismissal of our medical autonomy is remarkably democratic.
Through our reproductive years, every health concern is reflexively filtered through the lens of marriage and motherhood. There are historical reasons why women’s health became synonymous with maternal health in India—the country’s exceptionally high maternal mortality ratio, which stood at 556 in 1990 against a global average of 385. But even as we’ve made significant strides in reducing maternal mortality, our healthcare system is stuck in this narrow framework.
For instance, have you attempted to get a transvaginal sonogram as a young, unmarried woman? Good luck getting one, because our medical practitioners are more worried about protecting our “virtue” and a family’s anxiety about our hymen outweighs any medical necessity. Menstrual pain that disrupts daily life? Wait until “marriage” fixes it. Want your tubes tied because you’ve made an informed choice about not wanting children? You’ll need permission from your hypothetical future husband first, but not before your gynaecologist has tried their best to dissuade you. Things are so bad that a few years ago, Indian women compiled a crowd-sourced list of non-judgmental gynaecologists.
Even when we finally break free from the ankle bracelet of menstruation, we’re greeted with the lovely possibility of having symptoms of various diseases—from hypertension to arthritis—dismissed as “just menopause”. And when menopause actually does wreak havoc on our mental and physical health, research funding and medical attention mysteriously evaporate.
So prevalent is this phenomenon that there is even a term for it—the Yentl Syndrome, which derives its name from an eponymous 1983 film starring Barbra Streisand, who pretends to be a man to receive an education. In clinical parlance, however, it translates to circumstances where women are misdiagnosed and mistreated unless their symptoms manifest in men. In other words, your pain or signs of illness as a woman are much more likely to be written off as “low pain threshold”, “overactive imagination”, or “hysteria” than if you were a man. Of course, this is assuming you have the privilege to consult a doctor or medical professional in the first place. According to the National Family Health Survey-2, 1998-99, “only 52% of women in India are even consulted on decisions about their own health care. In Madhya Pradesh, the figure is as low as 37%.”
Also read: Cooking or health, lumps are a big no — Tata Trusts campaign hits right note on breast cancer
Women’s bodies, repository of spare parts
Our bodies, it seems, are never quite our own to worry about, but our problems are singularly ours. The ultimate grotesque proof of how little agency women have over their own bodies lies in India’s organ donation numbers.
The statistics tell a brutal story: 80 percent of live organ donors in India are women, while they make up less than 19 percent of organ recipients. From 1995 to 2021, 29,000 men underwent transplants, while the corresponding figure for women is only 6,945.. When you dig deeper, you find the usual justifications—men are primary breadwinners, their health must be prioritised. According to the ruthless mathematics of patriarchy, women’s bodies become a repository of spare parts for the family. The recent case of a young mother in Bengaluru, who died after “donating” a part of her liver to her husband’s aged aunt, isn’t an anomaly—it’s the logical conclusion of a system that treats women’s bodies as communal property.
If you think this systemic neglect of women’s health is limited to a few edge cases, consider this: two-thirds of Indian women are anaemic, a completely preventable condition that we have somehow normalised as a woman’s lot in life. A quarter of new mothers suffer from postpartum depression, yet we would rather guilt mothers than acknowledge the mental health crisis staring us in the face. The gender gap in healthcare is so pervasive that it’s literally reshaping our brains. Research shows that in gender-unequal countries like India, women’s cortices are measurably thinner than men’s, a difference absent in more equitable societies. Our bodies bear the physical imprint of this inequality.
When science deigns to pay attention to women’s health, it does so with staggering incompetence. Here’s a fact that would be laughable if it weren’t so enraging: until 2023, menstrual products weren’t even tested with actual menstrual blood. For decades, the industry used saline solution instead. From this institutional indifference to the active exclusion of queer and trans women from healthcare conversations, the message is clear: women’s health matters only when it can’t be ignored, and even then, barely enough to warrant real attention or resources.
So when you see that AI-generated breast cancer awareness ad from YouWeCan with its infantilising fruit metaphors, remember that it’s symptomatic of how modern India approaches women’s health. We are racing toward a future of AI-generated healthcare while still clutching our fossilised, medieval attitudes. The machines may be learning, but we refuse to.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
Very informative article.
Ms. Karanjeet Kaur is a certified snowflake. Getting offended by non-issues. Taking umbrage at the drop of a hat.
Curiously though, she did not utter a word on the massive doctor’s protest taking place in Kolkata to demand justice for the RG Kar hospital incident of rape and murder.
Speaks volumes about how genuine her brand of feminism is.
Two views are possible. Sometimes a little delicacy of phrase. Can never bring myself to use the word rape, prefer violation. Or cancer, a word the lips tremble to mouth.