I’ve not been able to read a whole lot of blogs, but I’ve been exposed enough to see that there’s a controversy swarming around this article by Hanna Rosin on why breast-feeding is overblown. I thought, “Uh-oh.” It’s bad for her if her evidence is weak, but worse for her if her evidence is strong, because this is an emotional subject for reasons of class status, marital politics, middle class anxiety, and competitive child-rearing, and therefore if you actually throw a little water on the situation, it’s just going to make people more angry. Also, she’s treading into an area of skeptical inquiry that’s one that even hardened skeptics try to avoid, which is questioning something that is undoubtedly beneficial, but whose benefits are overblown or that people use way past the point of excess, thinking that if a little is good, a lot must be even better. In that category, I’d put everything more facial moisturizers to massage to fiber consumption to vitamins. Yes, massages are relaxing, but they probably have no more health benefits than stretching. And vitamins are healthy, but you don’t need to double down, and sometimes doing so is dangerous. Fiber for regularity is great, but “detoxing” is a scam. And yep, facial moisturizers have benefits, but there’s a top limit where spending more money on a product doesn’t equal more benefits. Humans tend towards black and white thinking, so this sort of critique can cause massive problems as people turn “not as great as advertised” into “not good at all”. Add to it the emotional aspects of breast-feeding, and you have the makings of a shitstorm.
Which is no doubt why I’m writing this before I go gallivanting around Austin for SXSW, unable to follow up on comments. But I thought I could add something useful to the conversation, so here goes. Three parts: the direct scientific controversy, why feminists have been traditionally reluctant to subject breast-feeding to analysis, and why Rosin’s not wrong on the social aspects.
Critics accuse Rosin of cherry-picking her evidence against breast-feeding. But that critique I linked is bothersome, because their evidence is that they “could” have called a dozen pediatricians and researchers. I’d rather they contact researchers in actuality, cite studies, and avoid pediatricians, who are mainly a good group but who have a few prominent members who make a lot of money off pushing granola mommy stuff for yuppie couples (the whys on this I’ll get to), and who are more interested in serving the interests of trendy clients than using science. I fear, for instance, that the pediatricians clamoring to get quoted are the kinds that feed anti-vaccination hysteria and then buy a new BMW. But it’s beside the point—-they offered nothing at all but a “could”. Rosin did use evidence, and I’d be curious to see a real critique that proves she cherry-picked it.
What is true is there is that there’s no fucking way that breast milk is as great as people act like it is, so whether or not Rosin’s other claims are suspect, I can support the big one. There are some benefits, but it’s hard to pin down what they are exactly. But to hear people carry on, if you don’t breast feed, your kid will graduate at the bottom of her class, and be unable to make the graduation because she’ll be stuck in bed with 15 kinds of infections. Calling women who use formula a “public health menace”, or suggesting that it’s child abuse if you give up and use formula is exactly the sort of sexism of setting impossible standards on women that feminists see fit to criticize elsewhere. We recognize it as sexism when we’re told that women shouldn’t drink at all because we’re all “pre-pregnant”, and we’re onto the home schoolers who claim that no one but 100% mom all the time will do until the kid’s 15 years old. So why are we scared to look at breast-feeding under the same lens, and while agreeing that there’s health benefits, look at the way that it’s quite possibly another way of using women’s biology against us to fit us into restrained gender roles.
One major reason comes to mind for me—-feminists like breast-feeding as a feminist act because it’s pushback against sexual objectification. After all, one of the biggest feminist projects out there is to fight back against the belief that women exist “for” one reason and one reason only, which is to sexually gratify straight men (and then be punished for being such whores). It’s obvious that breast-feeding is a loaded thing, especially for sexist men who flip out when they see it happening in public, and it’s loaded because it’s seen as women and babies reclaiming breasts, which “belong” to men. I’m on board with this view of breast-feeding, but it’s always felt like a half step for me, because in a sense, it’s not really a great rebellion to expand the definition of woman from “sex object” to “sex object and nourishment for others machine”. Obviously, the patriarchy has always had room to constrain us both to just being objects of lust and mothers—-feminists should demand for all these and a hundred more.
It strikes me as a remarkable coincidence that the enthusiasm for breast-feeding, with its immense time demands, exploded right after it really became difficult for middle class men to demand that their wives stay at home to avoid emasculating them. It’s fascinating that the same effect comes from different reasons—-in the past, it was, “No wife of mine is going to have a job,” and everyone understood that men had a right not to have his wife out there making everyone think that a) he doesn’t make enough money to keep a housewife and b) that he’s not wearing the pants at home. Now, middle class men either know that’s poor form, and they may even really not want to put that on their wives. And yet, as Rosin points out:
We were raised to expect that co-parenting was an attainable goal. But who were we kidding? Even in the best of marriages, the domestic burden shifts, in incremental, mostly unacknowledged ways, onto the woman. Breast-feeding plays a central role in the shift. In my set, no husband tells his wife that it is her womanly duty to stay home and nurse the child. Instead, both parents together weigh the evidence and then make a rational, informed decision that she should do so. Then other, logical decisions follow: she alone fed the child, so she naturally knows better how to comfort the child, so she is the better judge to pick a school for the child and the better nurse when the child is sick, and so on. Recently, my husband and I noticed that we had reached the age at which friends from high school and college now hold positions of serious power. When we went down the list, we had to work hard to find any women. Where had all our female friends strayed? Why had they disappeared during the years they’d had small children?
When different paths lead to the same destination, I have to ask how different they are. It’s true, as the bloggers at Salon say, that some women have the immense privilege to roll a bassinet into the office and keep the job while having the baby. But it’s been true for a long time that some women have been able to leverage a rare class privilege into liberation from patriarchal demands—-it’s not like there weren’t your Auntie Mame types prior to second wave feminism. But for most middle class women, the baby at the job is not an option.
What’s also being recreated is a sense that women’s morality is class-based. In the past, the Good Woman was definitely the middle class woman who could afford to be a housewife, and working class women, especially women of color, were subject to all sorts of judgments and assumptions that they were sexually promiscuous, bad wives and mothers, etc. And while perhaps good liberals realize that’s wrong now, somehow the same unfair judgment of immorality is being leveled against women who can’t afford to quit their jobs to breast feed full time. Maybe you can’t consider them Bad Women to make the Good Women Good, but they are now the “bad” mothers to make middle class mothers who sacrifice their jobs for a theoretical 10 point raise in baby’s IQ feel good about themselves.
Again, while I’m not denying that breast milk has benefits, it’s fascinating that breast-feeding has magically managed to recreate oppressive structures that make middle class women dependent on their husbands and makes it seem immoral to be a working class woman who has no choice but to work. And it’s done it without pushback from feminists, because we’re not about to give the impression of questioning breast-is-best. In fact, I’m scared to death that people are going to deliberately misunderstand and say that I’m saying that breast is not best. Of course it’s better, all things being equal. But all things are not equal.
It’s nearly impossible to have a sober-minded conversation about this, I fear, because it strikes at the heart of a couple of things that cause massive anxiety. One, it’s hard to reconcile the way that sexism affects even those couples that have the best of intentions. But it’s also because breast feeding advocacy has been structured around what Barbara Ehrenreich called the “fear of falling”—-since middle class people don’t inherit wealth, but they do inherit opportunities, recreating the middle class every generation requires hard work and competition with each other. So parents are deeply invested in getting an edge for their children, and every little thing starts to loom large as the very trick that will put your kids a leg up over everyone else. That’s the carrot—-and the stick is the fear that if you skip any of these crucial steps, your child will fail to recreate your middle class life. Breast-feeding also gives people the feeling of control over the situation, and it’s obvious that anything that can be packaged to give middle class parents the feeling that they know best and that they and only they have the power to set their children on the right path will be eaten with a spoon. (That’s why anti-vaccination sentiment—-or even the unscientific “spacing the schedule” soft version—-is so popular, despite being routinely disproven by science.)
All these things cause anxiety to flare up, and therefore Mommy War judging and posturing. But it seems to me that if we really care about The Children, we need to care about the daughters as well as the sons, about the poorer kids as well as the middle class ones, and the way that breast-feeding is about class and gender (not just health) needs to be scrutinized for the benefit of all of them in their childhoods, but also in their adulthood.
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I’m supposed to be grading tonight or my students will lynch me on Monday. That said, it would take a team of scientists to collate and decipher this mess - no way Rosin could do it.
By and large I agree with you. I’m due in June and planning to breastfeed, and have thus started reading up on it, and I’m truly disturbed by how fetishized it is. I’ve tried mentioning this to some nursing mothers, and have occasionally been flamed and ostracized.
All things being equal (though they aren’t), nursing is cheaper and less labor-intensive than formula, which is why I’m drawn to it. I don’t think planning to nurse makes me some better mother (though others have said as much), and if it doesn’t work out I’m not going to beat myself up over it. And that what really angers me about the mommy wars; what should be personal choices designed to fit your family have become bludgeons to guilt trip women.
And yes, it really is less labor intensive, if you’re not pumping much at least. When it comes to 2 a.m. feedings a breastfeeding mother can roll over, pop the boob in the mouth and be done with it. A formula feeding mother has to get up, make a bottle, warm a bottle, bring it back up, and by this time the kid’s probably freaking out totally, making it harder to calm down and longer to get back to sleep. Or so it’s been explained to me. I’ll find out how true this is in June.