I was the only man in the room when I went to get my mammogram - except for the two who were there to support their wives. The women working there did their best to make me comfortable – I was not their first male patient– but it was a futile effort.

Men don’t get breast cancer because men don’t have breasts. That’s the kind of thinking that costs more than 400 men their lives each year in this country. True, 44,000 women die of breast cancer each year, but they are supposed to know how important it is to be alert. Men don’t know and don’t want to know because they don’t want to think about having quintessentially female organs on their body. And functionally, we don’t. 

Breasts are glands that produce milk. Men don’t have these. But they do have tissue on their upper chest that can more or less resemble breasts and that even sport vestigial nipples. You would be at some pains to find more useless tissue. These so-called breasts and nipples don’t work. They never worked. They never will work.

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So let’s address the problem as it should have been addressed long ago. Since this tissue does not contain milk-producing glands, it clearly is not breast tissue. It might more properly be called suprapectoral tissue. And those things that look like they might be nipples if men had nipples, which they don’t? Let’s call them bilateral suprapectoral centering markers or BSCMs. Now would any macho-man have trouble dealing with structures bearing those names?

I have found that as I gain maturity, certain changes take place in my body. Maturity. That’s the word. When AARP named the magazine for its members, they didn’t call it “Today’s Geezer” or “Contemporary Crone.” They called it Modern Maturity. So we’re not getting older, we’re all getting more mature.

In addition to presumed wisdom, one of the things all this accumulating maturity brings is a certain loosening of the flesh, a collection of slack, mushy stuff where there used to be nice, solid muscle. For me, as most of us, some of this has happened in the vicinity of my chest. Just how much of this stuff do I have to worry about? Let’s just say that I have more than Calista Flockhart and less than Arnold Schwarzenegger. And some of it was getting lumpy. And those lumps had to be identified. And that took a mammogram. Can’t we call it a  “pectogram” or something?

Nationally, 25-percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer will die from it. But 31-percent of men so diagnosed will die because they will wait longer before discovering the problem and seeking treatment. Women are advised to undergo routine mammograms upon reaching middle age. Men are not.

When the report of my results came in the mail, they continued thoughtlessly to heap indignity on me by addressing me as “Ms. Waxman.” But I quickly forgave them since the report was negative. I felt relief but continuing discomfiture. It’s that very discomfiture caused by unwarranted gender confusion that costs men their lives. You can see that I managed sufficiently to come to grips with it all to tell you about it. But the experience was unnecessarily daunting.

Men, we can call them breasts or we can call it suprapectoral tissue. But whatever we call it, we need to examine it periodically just as women are supposed to do. I know we don’t want to do this for the same genetic reason we won’t stop and ask directions when we’re lost. But, really, it’s not worth dying for.

And now the good news you knew must have been coming. Men do not need to get pap smears.

Contact Lionel Waxman at territorial@waxmanmedia.com or visit his website: www.newflashpoint.com.