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Regardless of how large the study or how impressive the findings, reporters consistently offset the numbers with anecdotal statistics. In the words of ABC News correspondent Cokie Roberts on “Nightline” in 1995, “There are the thousands upon thousands of women who have breast implants and complain of terrible pain. Can they all be wrong?” Some social scientists also elevated first-person reports over scientific expertise. The sociologist Susan Zimmermann, author of Silicone Survivors, a book published in 1998, complains that “the medical community relies on research such as the Mayo Clinic study instead of trusting their patients’ accounts of their symptoms.”37

For Zimmermann and other feminists who have spoken out against them, implants represent the literal embodiment of male oppression. After all, the critics point out, prior to the FDA ban four out of five implant operations were for cosmetic purposes. (Read: in the service of male fantasies.) And when implanted women became ill, physicians—almost always males—dismissed them. “We have been down this road before,” wrote Jennifer Washburn in Ms. “Women in real pain going to doctors and being told that it is all in their heads. Women being encouraged to use medical devices that don’t function properly and being told these devices are perfectly safe when they aren’t.”38

But lurking behind debatable analogies to the Dalkon Shield and legitimate concerns about taking women’s reports seriously lay more than a little inconsistency. If listening to women about breast implants is important, why not listen to informed women such as Marcia Angell, a feminist physician and executive editor of the New England,journal ofMedicine?Alternately ignored and denounced by implant activists, Angell eventually acknowledged how much it hurt her personally to be told, “this is a women’s issue and if you don’t believe that breast implants cause connective tissue disease you are therefore anti-feminist or anti-women.”39

Rather than condemning Angell, feminists might reasonably have been expected to praise her for standing up for women. In 1992 after the FDA ban Angell accused the agency’s director of “treating women like little girls.” Echoing the position taken by the National Council of Breast Cancer Organizations and by Y-ME, the leading support group for breast cancer patients, Angell argued that by removing implants from the market the FDA had declared, in effect, that women are unable to weigh the costs and benefits and make a rational decision.40

Nor was Angell the only knowledgeable feminist shunned for her skepticism about implant illnesses. Elinor Brecher, a feature writer with the Miami Herald,took both a professional and personal interest in the controversy, having received implants herself following a double mastectomy in 1985. Not trusting her own experiences as representative (Brecher reported that her implants did not cause her problems), she surveyed friends, none of whom said they had had more than minor problems with their implants, and she called officials at cancer clinics around the country, from whom she learned that follow-up studies of implant patients had recorded few problems.

Brecher readily acknowledges, as does Angell, that breast implants can produce considerable pain and disfigurement by causing capsular contracture (hardening of the breast tissue), but no matter where she checked—Brecher also interviewed physicians from an assortment of specialities—could she find support for the claim that implants cause serious or systemic disease. In a series of articles in the Herald in the early 1990s she reported the encouraging findings of her investigative journalism, but her well-researched and persuasive pieces were neither picked up by the national press nor did reporters at other publications follow her lead and conduct their own investigations. The reason, Brecher suspects, is simple. “The better story, the sexier story, was the one about women being disfigured by horrible diseases caused by greedy plastic surgeons,” she told me. That story