The bogus business of stigma-busting

Our society is bristling with social stigmas, we’re told, even in the progressive West, even in London. Life is so horribly stigmatised that celebrities are increasingly keen to raise awareness not of diseases or disabilities, but of the stigma that’s said to surround them. So: less campaigning for cancer research, more for breaking the stigma around talking about cancer. Less feeding the world, more brave standing up to the stigma attached to food poverty.

Once you’re alert for stigma, it’s astonishing how much mention of it there is. There are the obvious and much discussed stigmas surrounding mental illness and sexuality, but also (I’ve read) there’s a stigma around having red hair, blonde hair or black hair; being curvy or ‘naturally thin’ (the horror!); eating meat or eating ‘clean’ (‘Your love of raw vegan cheesecakes could be costing you friends’, reported the Independent).

Spotting stigmas is a rewarding game. My favourite so far is a po-faced report about the stigma attached to eating crisps. In this country we truffle up around six billion packets of crisps a year, which is more than every other European country put together. Has there ever been such a blissfully ineffective stigma? Stigmas are cited so often and with such confidence that I’ve begun to think of them as actual creatures, like the gremlins once said to cling to the wings of fighter planes — and almost as imaginary.

I first caught wind of the stigma industry earlier this summer, when several magazines reported the launch of a fashion range devoted to challenging ‘the stigma surrounding talking about ovaries’. The clothes themselves were stern, with a strong sense of moral duty. ‘Ovaries. Talk about them’ said the T-shirts in large print. Well, I tried, but what’s there to say? ‘Did you have a nice weekend? And what about your ovaries?’

The idea of the T-shirts was to raise awareness of ovarian cancer, but as the chief symptom of ovarian cancer is bloating, it was unclear to me in what way talking about ovaries would help.