In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Body image

I was the girl who thought bulimia sounded like a great idea.

[Trigger warning for eating disorders]

For most of my youth, my exposure to eating disorders had been pretty much limited to Lifetime-style movies where the pretty young woman desperately wants to join the cheerleading squad and starts exercising all the time and throwing up her food, and everyone compliments her on losing weight, except for her abandoned former best friend, who is the only one who can tell that Something Is Very Wrong, and eventually she collapses at school, and then there’s inpatient treatment and a roommate who’s been Doing This For Years, blah blah blah meaningful self-discovery, blah blah happy ending, blah blah ED hotline blah.

How to be beautiful in four excruciating steps

Toiling your whole life to be beautiful (and consequently powerful), but tired of lining your eyes with a pin dipped in lampblack after brightening them with a dropperful of perfume? Of course you are. We all are. There is a better way, free of the traditional harsh chemicals, using completely different harsh chemicals and ritualistic abrasions. In his 1889 Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, Barkham Burroughs instructs the women of his day “How to Be Handsome” and so “to govern, control, manage, influence, and retain the adoration of husbands, fathers, brothers, lovers or even cousins.”

“Will I be pretty?”

The classics of yesteryear, brought to you today: From the 2002 National Poetry Slam, Katie Makkai on “pretty.”

Hair Part III: Head

I have a love/hate relationship with the hair on my head. I hated it for most of my childhood and adolescence. I was super envious of the curls that many of the other girls in my Jewish school had. My hair was thin and mousy brown. Mousy. I remember seeing that word in the book “Jennifer Murdley’s Toad,” an awesome piece of young adult fiction. The main character, Jennifer Murdley, was chubby and had mousy brown hair, just like me. Of course, the girl on the cover was thin and blonde. I loved the book anyways.

The summer after I graduated high school, I dyed my hair bright red. I had intended on highlights, and got the cap method instead of foils because of price. My hair was thin enough that is pretty much just looked solid red. Bright red. The color of a good, ripe tomato. My hair stayed red throughout most of college. When I got lazy, it grew back out to brown. But I always loved it red. With bright red hair (as well as the blue, green, purple, and orange that followed), I could be noticed. With mousy brown hair, I was plain and shy, the fat girl who hid in the corner. But I couldn’t hide when my hair made me stand out.

***

Around age 21, I started thinking about covering my head full time. Traditionally, in Judaism, men cover their heads. Those are the little caps that people associate with Jewish events. Many religiously observant men wear them everywhere. Some also wear hats or other head coverings, depending on the sect. I’ve heard a number of explanations for this practice: it’s a reminder that there’s something higher than you; it’s a public statement of Jewishness; it’s a safeguard against vanity. As an egalitarian Jew, one who believes that requirements should not generally differ between men and women, I felt conflicted. My beliefs said that I should cover my head. It seemed incredibly simple. But I didn’t want to wear a kippah. I didn’t have the energy to challenge gender norms in that way.

Non-Jews, if they’ve seen people wearing kippot, have usually only seen them on men and tend to ask lots of questions. Many people, especially non-egalitarian Jews, assume that women who take on historically male rituals and garments are simply doing it for attention or to make a statement. I wanted neither, but covering my head seemed like an important affirmation of my Judaism and my egalitarianism. I thought about wearing hats or scarves or bandanas, but there was another problem: historically, the only women who covered their heads were ones who were married. I was looking to date, and didn’t want to have people interpret my action that way. I also didn’t want people to think that I believed that women had to have their hair covered, and I very much differentiate between head covering and hair covering.

And, though I hated to admit it, part of it was vanity. I loved my brightly-colored hair and didn’t want to cover it up. So I didn’t.

But when Mr. Ruggedly-Handsome and I were a couple months away from getting married, I revisited the issue (Mr. R-H has been asked not to be referred to as Mr. Shoshie because he thinks that Shoshie is a weird alias– no accounting for taste). I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about signaling that I was single because, well, I wouldn’t be, and hadn’t been for quite a while. I knew I wasn’t going to cover my hair, for the aforementioned reasons. And, after having a long conversation with a friend who had recently started covering her head, I realized that vanity wasn’t a good enough reason for me, anymore.

When I mentioned my decision to Mr. R-H, he asked me why. And I told him that, in all other ways, we were observant Jews. But not in this one, and I thought it was important. He decided to start wearing a kippah full time. We’d both start after wedding. I bought a bunch of thick headbands, headscarves, fascinators, and awesome hats. I looked up ways to tie up the headscarves, and brainstormed haircuts that would allow me to show off my brightly colored hair while still covering my head sufficiently (traditionally, a covering as least the size of your fist). These days, I feel weird if I don’t have my head covered, at least if I’m not at the gym or hanging out around the house. It’s become a part of my daily uniform.

***
These days, I have another reason for favoring my head coverings: my already-fine hair has become even thinner. It’s possible that it’s been due to stress or my recent ill health, but female pattern baldness runs in my family, so it’s definitely possible that my hair will continue to thin until I barely have enough to cover my head. I’ve thought a lot about how I’m going to respond when/if this happens. Will I wear a wig? Will I shave my head? Will I just wear lots of hats and scarves? Should I continue dying my hair? It may make my hair fall out faster, but it brings me a lot of happiness in the meantime.

I’ve probably cried more over this hair issue than any of the others that I’ve brought up.

Mr. R-H tries to cheer me up by saying that we’ll lose our hair together, but it’s not the same. He can lose his hair and still feel like a man. How can I lose my hair and still feel like a woman? We don’t have any cultural tropes for this, because women are supposed to have hair on their heads.

For the time being, I’m ignoring it. I’m wearing my hats and my headbands. I have a box of red hair dye sitting on my bathroom counter. My hair may not be the curly locks that I craved when I was 10, but it’s doing OK for me now. As for the future, well, I’ll try as best as I can to build my own story.

Hair Part II: Face

I was horrified when I started getting hair on my face. Little mustache hairs at first, then some on my chin. I also have wispy sideburns and thick eyebrows, though those don’t bother me as much.

I thought I was a freak.

I didn’t know that other women got facial hair as well. Nobody told me. No other women ever mentioned getting eyebrows sugared, mustaches waxed, chin hair tweezed or lasered off. Because, while we acknowledge that leg hair is a fact of life for most women, we never talk about facial hair. But just from doing some cursory Internet research, it looks like 10-25% of women are estimated to have facial hair. That’s a lot of women.

I could write about the ways in which facial hair blurs the boundaries between masculine and feminine, and how that’s scary.

I could write about wanting to feel beautiful, despite being a fat woman, and how facial hair gets in the way of that.

But I want to talk about race and ethnicity. Because I think far more than 10-25% of my Jewish female friends have facial hair, though none of us talk about it, except for a quick tip now and then regarding a method for removal. And although, theoretically, I feel the same way about my facial hair as I do about my leg hair (Why should I remove it? It’s not hurting anyone. Smash the patriarchy!) I still bring my tweezers along on trips. I’ve even contemplated laser treatment because I feel so ashamed of it.

One of the few fights that I remember between me and my brother (and trust me, we’ve had many fights), was when I was 20 and he was 15. He tried to insult me by telling me that my mustache was better than his, and it worked. I ran to my room in tears.

What is it about facial hair that makes it so shameful?

I think that one reason for Ashekenazi Jewish women,* is because it’s a reminder that we can almost blend in to whiteness, but not quite.

Don’t get me wrong. I benefit from white privilege, as do many of my friends. I am white, and I’ve never heard a compelling reason from a light-skinned Ashkenazi Jewish person in the US for why they do not qualify as white. But it wasn’t so long ago that we were considered a different race, fully separated from whiteness. Distinguishing physical characteristics brings that past to present. Despite my pale skin, fairly straight hair and nose, despite my English last name, I am hairier than your average US woman, and that hairiness is because of my Jewish ancestry. It sets me apart. It plays into Jewish stereotypes about Jewish women being more masculine (loud, overbearing, whathaveyou) than their non-Jewish counterparts.

In a culture that privileges tall, narrow-hipped, light-skinned, light-and-straight-haired, women, who definitely don’t have any facial hair south of their eyelashes, it’s another way that we can’t possibly fit, because even if we spend every day meticulously tweezing those wayward hairs, even if we drum up the money to remove that mustache for good, it wouldn’t matter. We still had to concern ourselves with it in the first place, same as the stereotypical Jewish teenage girl and her nose job (thank you, Glee, for perpetuating that hateful bit of misogyny against Jewish women). It’s even more beauty work that’s required of us, and even if we follow through with it, we can’t win. Because you get more facial hair as you age. Because even laser treatment doesn’t work perfectly. Because sometimes you don’t have time to tweeze in the morning. Because of stereotypes about the sneaky Jew trying to fit in. Because patriarchy.

I don’t have any good answers here. My feeling, at least, is that facial hair is even more taboo than leg hair, for the reasons mentioned above and many, many others (one other: transmisogyny! another: powerful women = scary! another: masculine women are unfuckable! I could go on and on…)

So, at this point, I just want to get the conversation going. Do you have facial hair? If so, how do you deal with it? Do you let it grow? Do you remove it? Have you ever considered *not* removing it? How much beauty work is too much? When is it enough?

When do we get to stop?

*I’m not a Jewish woman of color, and so I can in no way speak for their experiences.

Why Breastfeeding Is A Feminist Issue

What’s going so wrong with the breastfeeding and formula-feeding conversation?

Start with the rampant individualism. Conversations about how you feed your baby tend to be preoccupied with women’s choices and decisions.. and then, blame. You know the conversation has little feminist value when you end up at a point where some poor, exhausted woman is trying to justify her decision to formula-feed her baby to you, or likewise, if some other poor woman is trying to justify her reasons for breastfeeding her toddler to you.

The main reason why the breastfeeding/formula feeding conversation is not moving forward is because it is bogged down with this individualism. I think there are several factors behind that. Firstly, public health messages, like those promoting breastfeeding, are notoriously heavy-handed and don’t deal well with nuance. This is a shame because people’s health is actually quite nuanced. Secondly, the breastfeeding message is, in part, a marketing message attempting to compete with the marketing messages of formula companies. When you do this you invariably make women consumers. Thirdly, we live in an era when motherhood is hyper-competitive and driven by perfectionism. Everyone is trying to Get It Super Right Or Terrible Consequences Will Happen For Their Children, and everything seems to come down to mothers and their choices. This leads to conversations that over-emphasise the role of choice in outcomes and also, that invariably run into the limitations of professionalising motherhood when it is still monetarily worthless. Finally, it’s just so terribly easy for a patriarchal culture to put all the responsibility on mothers and not chase the real culprits behind the big decline in breastfeeding and long-term breastfeeding rates in Western countries, which are things like inflexible workplace policies, the absence of universal maternity leave schemes, insufficient anti-discrimination legislation and hostile societal attitudes towards women’s bodies.

One of my good friends was an unapologetic formula-feeder with her children. She tried breastfeeding but having grown up with constant fat-shaming she was unable to ever feel comfortable with breastfeeding. When she found herself forcing her newborn to skip feeds during the very hot days of summer so as not to have to breastfeed in front of visiting family and friends and then panicking about whether she had dehydrated her tiny baby, she decided it was time to formula feed. She loved bottle-feeding – it helped her to start enjoying her baby. Was there much pressure on you, I asked, to breastfeed, and were people judgemental about your formula-feeding? Not that I noticed, my friend told me, but this world can apologise for how much it hated my body before I will apologise for not breastfeeding my children.

Good for her, except, what a bloody heart-breaking way to finally reclaim some space for yourself. Experiences like hers remind me what is so damn wrong with individualism in the breastfeeding/formula-feeding conversation. We’re pushing breastfeeding as a message but we sure aren’t embracing it as a culture. And we somehow blame individual mothers for the shortfall.

After recognising the problem with individualism, often the feminist discussion retreats to a place where everyone agrees to respect one another’s right to choose what is best for them and their babies and then to just all shut the hell up. Initially this makes sense, if everyone is shouting over the top of one another and everyone is feeling very defensive about their feeding decisions then let’s agree to turn down the volume. The problem is that once you turn the volume down on breastfeeding activism and formula-feeding choices we don’t get silence, we get another kind of noise. Because we exist not in a vacuum but in a misogynist culture.

I swear, I really do write about other issues in motherhood, even though I seem to have made breastfeeding my core topic in guest posts at Feministe.. and this is maybe why it has been my topic du jour, because breastfeeding is more than a choice about how to feed your baby, it is a lens through which you can see with absolute clarity the intersection between misogyny and motherhood. There are a million other possible examples but this area of mothering is a stunning case of it. Because, let me be clear about this – women get harassed and shamed and illegally evicted from public space for breastfeeding; women get threatened with losing custody of their children for breastfeeding for ‘too long’; women get ridiculed and bullied for trying to pump milk at work; women get described as a freak show for breastfeeding twins or tandem feeding; women get called names like ‘stupid cow’ or ‘filthy slut’ for breastfeeding; women get told they are sexually abusing their children for breastfeeding; women get told they’re not allowed to keep breast milk in communal fridges because it’s a dirty bodily fluid (and cow’s milk isn’t?); women are bullied into stopping breastfeeding because breasts are the sexual property of their husbands; women get told that breastfeeding is obscene in front of other people’s children or other people’s husbands; women get told their bodies are too fat and too saggy and too veiny to be exposed while breastfeeding; women get told to stay at home with their babies until they are no longer breastfeeding; women get instructed to throw blankets over themselves and their babies if they wish to breastfeed outside the home.. and on it goes. This is not the result of some peculiar sensitivity towards babies and small children eating, this does not happen with bottle-feeding, this is specifically about breastfeeding and it is about policing women’s bodies and lives.

Breastfeeding is a feminist issue not because mummy bloggers like me say it is, but because it’s about working to ensure that women and their bodies are considered as important (as normal) as men and their bodies. Something happens for all of us – regardless of whether we are breastfeeders or not – when a woman is allowed to breastfeed, in public, as a member of her community, while getting shit done in her life – it makes a statement that women belong, that women’s bodies belong, that women are here.

The animosity shown towards mothers who formula-feed is judgemental crusading and it should never be condoned by feminists but you are missing the big picture if you argue that bottle-feeding is demonised and breastfeeding is not – that we’ve gone too far with lactivism. Quite simply, something is very frigging wrong in our world when women are harassed and shamed for doing something that women’s bodies do as a routine part of raising children. This should trouble all feminists.

Breastfeeding also provides an example of how deeply hostile workplace culture is towards mothers.

Breastfeeding can be hard work in the beginning. (I got the latch so messed up when I breastfed my first baby that in the first couple of weeks I almost ended up with the end of my nipple torn off. My baby would finish a breastfeed and dribble blood out of her mouth. I know, so vampire. All those years of averting my slightly horrified gaze from mothers breastfeeding in public when I was young did not prepare me at all well when I came to breastfeed my own baby). Breastfeeding in those early months requires a lot of energy. You need to be eating and drinking and resting regularly or you can’t sustain a milk supply. (Try chasing dairy cows around the paddock all day long and see how much milk you get from them in the evening). This is an excellent argument for maternity leave, lactation breaks in the workplace and generally supporting new mothers. But it also shows you how far we have to go, because in the United States there still isn’t a universal paid maternity leave scheme and even for those who do have access to maternity leave it is usually woefully short. No sooner do you get breastfeeding established and bang! you’re back at work (full-time, of course), and separated from them all day long while now being expected to suddenly get used to a breast pump. And then, oh, breastfeeding didn’t work out for them, what could possibly be the explanation?

When feminists write about these tensions for mothers there is a tendency to argue that because it is so difficult to breastfeed in these circumstances that we need to back-off about breastfeeding. I’m a little sceptical of this strategy, though I think it comes from a good place. Women are entitled to their choices, of course, let’s not head back into individualism, but isn’t it awfully convenient that we never question the institutions of power that happen to arrange themselves in such a way that women have little real choice about breastfeeding?

Because here is the other thing about breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is lazy. Ultimately, I came to love breastfeeding as a mother because I am quite lazy. Breastfeeding is fast food. Breastfeeding is multi-tasking. Breastfeeding is portable. Breastfeeding is unstructured and unscheduled. All of these elements are very pleasing to lazy people, like me. So, it annoys me no end as a feminist that we, as a Western culture, stigmatise breastfeeding when in the long-run it can often make mothers’ and children’s lives easier.

I can’t help but be suspicious that we prioritise solutions to this work-life conflict that suit a model of workplace built around men’s lives and that consistently challenge women to find new ways of adapting without ever questioning whether our economy could be moulded just a little more fairly around care work and dependency. Because, dependence is not deviant behaviour – being young, being old, being unwell, being hurt and healing, being disabled – it’s normal life. And this is not hippy stuff; this is just finding a better way of working with capitalism. For that matter, breastfeeding is not hippy, it just is. It’s not some special gift, it’s not a sacrifice, it is just the way mammals generally feed their young.

If we were more accepting of breastfeeding on those grounds instead of trying to up-sell it then maybe we wouldn’t be stuck in such an endless loop of defensiveness with formula-feeding choices. Yes, breastfeeding has nutritional and immunity merits but it is also offers a way of being close with a baby and that, in itself, is valuable enough. There are other ways to experience that closeness, of course, and mothers shouldn’t be forced to parent in that way if they don’t want to, but for those who do, we shouldn’t sabotage them. And this is where the feminist conversation must be particularly careful, and it’s a tricky juggling act, but in our desire to neutralise all that ridiculous individualist blaming of women for their choices we often diminish the significance of their choices to them. Because when we say breastfeeding is not all that important we silence the grief some women feel about not having been able to breastfeed and we take away the sense of achievement other women feel about breastfeeding in spite of multiple obstacles, but possibly worst of all, we undermine the broader message every parent is trying to give, which is that workplace and institutional change needs to happen.. and it needs to happen soon.

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P.S. I want to acknowledge and thank one of the writers of Hoyden About Town, Lauredhel who stayed up late with me one night so I could bounce my arguments around with her and who steered me when I was off-track and reminded me of elements I had overlooked. Thank you, L.

P.P.S. I also want to acknowledge that although I have generalised about breastfeeding mothers here, as I recently discussed on Feministe, fathers sometimes breastfeed, too.

Better that children are hungry than fat

New York City Council looks like it’s going to approve a resolution in that will provide for breakfast in NYC classrooms. NYC currently ranks last among cities that provide for free breakfast programs, with only 34% of kids who qualify for free/reduced lunch getting breakfast at school. Bloomberg, obesity-fighter extraordinaire, is opposed. He’s worried that having a bowl of cereal in the morning will further contribute to childhood obesity, especially those fatties who will eat two breakfasts, one at home and one at school.

Except that skipping breakfast has been linked to weight gain. And eating breakfast has been linked to better performance in school. And, of course, school performance contributes to to financial success later in life which is correlated with lower rates of obesity. So even if you *do* buy into the idea that we can make fat kids thinner, this is clearly a good thing.

So, basically, even though Bloomberg says that it’s all about making healthier and happier kids, ultimately it’s just about trying to make kids less fat. And, despite the rhetoric, those aren’t the same thing.

For what it’s worth, my high school provided breakfast (free for kids who qualified) and most of my teachers allowed food in the first period of the day. Because they realized that it’s important for kids to get proper nutrition in order to learn and grow.

Hair Part I: Legs

I’ve never been particularly consistent about shaving my legs. They were already pretty hairy when, at age 12, I asked my mother for my first razor. It was pink and disposable. After my evening shower, I grabbed it and the shaving cream, and attempted to de-hair my legs. It took a long time. The razor kept getting clogged and I nicked my heel. It gushed blood, as heel nicks do, and the bleeding took forever to stop. But, by the end, I managed to get most of the hair, save for a few random patches. I pretty much always miss a couple spots.

I never shaved my legs in the winter. Sure, I agreed with the commercials that “silky smooth” felt great, but I just couldn’t be bothered. I’d have fits of embarrassment in gym class because we had to wear shorts, but an extra five minutes of sleep trumped that embarrassment. Thus went my first experience as a hair nonconformist.

I maintained my non-diligence through college, shaving (mostly) during skirt season and covering my hairy legs with long skirts and tall boots through the winter.

Then I moved to Seattle, where pretty much every season is skirt season.

I started dating my soon-to-be-husband and gained my leg-shaving motivation. After all, why would a great guy like him stay with a fat, hairy woman like me? One strike or another might be OK, but tolerance of both just seemed like too much to ask for.

And, well, I couldn’t be less fat, so I would be less hairy.

For the first few months of our relationship, I shaved without fail. Then I started testing the waters. A day without shaving. 2 days. 3. A week.

The STBH didn’t say anything.

Finally, the secret came out: the STBH didn’t actually care about silky smooth legs. In fact, he thought the whole hair-removal thing was pretty weird.

I didn’t really understand. Didn’t he know that women were supposed to have smooth legs? Didn’t he know that I was supposed to be ashamed of my stubble? Didn’t he know that “hairy” is one of the worst things a woman could be?

I continued shaving regularly for a bit, but it became a less and less frequent regimen. I haven’t yet reached the point where I feel comfortable with my hairy legs all the time, but it’s a process. I haven’t replaced my razors in a while, though I did shave before the last wedding I went to. Sometimes I have a fit of wanting to feel feminine, and my brain still thinks that I can only do that with smooth legs.

Most of the time, my logic goes as follows:
1. “I should shave my legs! I will look prettier with shaved legs!”
2. “I have no razors. I need to get razors.”
3. “I totally don’t have time to get razors. Maybe on the way back from work…?”
4. “Wait, fuck this. Why should I go out of my way to shave my fucking legs? I’m no less of a woman when I have leg hair! Smash the patriarchy!”

As I said, it’s a process.

I really wanted this to be some story about how I made an enlightened decision that razors are tools of the patriarchy and cast them away in a fit of rebellion. But really it’s the story of claiming back a bit of time and money for myself.

I’ve been challenged on that, mostly by other women, even feminist ones. I’ve gotten side-eyes while in bathing suits and comments while in dresses. I’ve been asked whether I’m making a statement, and sometimes I feel like I am.

But most of the time, the statement is that I just don’t feel like it. And that’s OK.

In many ways, my resistance to shaving feels like my resistance to dieting. It’s work that I’m supposed to do in order to maintain patriarchal standards of beauty. Even if I’m not intending to be subversive, I am, simply by enjoying and living in my fat, hairy body. It’s selfishness, and women aren’t supposed to be selfish. It’s abstaining from a beauty requirement, and women are supposed to uphold a certain paradigm of beauty. It’s a challenge to what patriarchy says a woman should look like and it’s a challenge to women who buy into those standards to consider why they spend the time and money.

What’s sickening is that even something as simple as letting leg hair grow out has its consequences. I don’t wear skirts while on job interviews or while presenting at conferences, for instance. My clean, soft leg hair would be seen as unkempt at best, a sign that I neglect self-care at worst. But I think that’s just another reason to be more public about my hairy legs. An army of hairy-legged feminists sounds scary to a lot of people, other feminists included, but I think it’s just the thing we need. I hope that the more women are upfront about not wanting to shave their legs, the more accepted it will become to abstain completely.

Meet Your Local Extreme Breastfeeder

The other day one of my seven year old daughter’s guinea pigs died and it is the first death my two kids have dealt with up close and they love their guinea pigs, and I do, too, and so it was really very sad. Their father was away trekking for two weeks – because I am a saint and I gave him the gift of solitude for his birthday – and so, I found myself alone in a way too, with all of this. (Huge eye-roll in sympathy to the real single parents who do this solo parenting gig all year around and who get crapped on by so many people for their, frankly, friggin’ heroic efforts). The guinea pig death happened on this very chaotic morning. Actually, all the days where I am working in the city are chaotic because ‘school + kindy + workplace’ and back again in the evening equals a whole lot of trips in opposing directions and a very long day for all. The three year old was being a really obnoxious griever, entirely missing the point of why his big sister and I were so upset, and just wanting to endlessly explore the nature of death in gruesome detail. All he knows about death is that it is something that can happen when people fight with guns and it is why his mother is a bit sensitive about gun-play for little kids and why he gets frowned at when he pretends to shoot anyone. So, every second phrase out of his mouth was “who killed her, but who killed our guinea pig?”. Didn’t matter how many times I explained that death just happens sometimes, all he wanted to do was be a frickin’ detective. Meanwhile, his poor sister was getting more and more distressed by her brother’s death carnival. It was awful. And I did think quite a lot – why me, why am I having to deal with this alone while their father is out in the wilderness enjoying himself?

But by that night, when we three got home from ‘work + school + kindy + after-school care arrangements’ and I showed them where the little pig was buried, the three year old finally appreciated the finality of death and he was suddenly on the same page as the rest of us. We were all in my bed together (see the title of this post above), and I was breastfeeding him because that’s what he likes to do when he goes to sleep and also because I thought that breastfeeding might be a better comfort than story books. But he immediately came off the breast because he was sobbing too much to feed and it seemed he wanted to talk to my breasts about the guinea pig’s death. So, if your rule is ‘kids should stop breastfeeding when they are old enough to ask for it’ how do you feel about kids who are old enough to emote their grief to it? I don’t even know how I feel about that.

Sometime in their first year babies go through a developmental stage where they finally understand that the hand you wave in front of them or the nipple you pop into their mouth whenever you appear, is actually part of you and not some random toy you happen to pick up. Considering babies arrive in the world knowing almost nothing, you can see why this would be a concept that would require some thinking about for them, but apparently, that developmental stage can be incomplete. Three year olds exist in this really trippy stage of life where they know puppets aren’t real, and that’s why they’ve stopped screaming when one approaches them, but they are still capable of getting completely lost in ‘pretend’ and they really do imagine that inanimate objects can be kind of real and have personalities. So, when he started talking to my breasts (“breastfeedings” he calls them, in case you were wondering), and he was being so sincere and sad I did not know quite what to do. Should my breasts be answering him, it seems rude to remain completely indifferent to someone who is sharing the most tragic moment of their life with you? I mean, my breasts aren’t cold-hearted. And if my breasts answered him should they have my voice, which, would kind of take you out of the moment, or should they have a unique voice of their own, and in which case, what does a breast’s voice sound like?

So, this is breastfeeding beyond babyhood. It’s both strange and normal.

I hear you have a reality TV show coming to your screens in the US about ‘extreme breastfeeders’ and I thought you might like to know one of those weirdos for yourself. Here I am. Before I had children I thought breastfeeding for twelve months was pushing it. Six months is fine, but if they can eat solids then why breastfeed any further? With the first child I really surprised myself and I breastfed her for just under two years. Now I am breastfeeding a three and a half year old who is tall enough to look like a five year old. We could definitely do an impression of that notorious TIME magazine cover. He’s partial to a bit of standing-up breastfeeding, too. ‘This me’ would totally have horrified ‘old me’. Public breastfeeding? Wasn’t keen on that. Breastfeeding toddlers? Really wasn’t keen on that.

The thing I didn’t realise back then when I was repulsed by the idea of breastfeeding a child ‘old enough to ask for it’ is that babies ‘ask for it’ right from birth and they never stop asking for it, their methods just get increasingly sophisticated. And that sophistication, like all other milestones your baby achieves, makes a parent beam with pleasure. If you found yourself compelled to respond to their earlier requests you will quite likely feel compelled by their later requests.

Here is how a baby ‘asks for it’: they cry shrilly, they nuzzle you, they suck on your finger, and they turn their face towards you if you lightly brush their cheek. Then one day, while balanced in your lap, they throw themselves backwards to be laying down near your chest. You think, holy hell, your little neck is going to break, because they do this when they’re still in their floppy stage and haven’t developed proper neck muscles. Sometimes, they clamp on to the fleshiness of your arms and they suck you a hickey. If you teach your baby to sign, like I did, of course I did – see the title of this post, then they might even begin signing ‘breastfeed’ to you at five months old. When someone else holding them passes the baby into your arms they will tilt their head sideways with their mouth gaping in anticipation. They can burst into impatient tears at the sight of you undoing your bra. Sometimes they will reach their arms down your dress or lift up your t-shirt. They usually do all of this before they finally ‘ask for it’ with a spoken word and even then their word may be nothing more offensive than the adoption of a particular pitch when they plead “Mama” at you. At what point are ‘they old enough to ask for it’, and at what point is it too much? Depends on you, their mother, but don’t be surprised if you start to find the notion of ‘old enough to ask for it’ absurd.

Maybe you want to ask me, your local extreme breastfeeder, some questions.

Am I an earth mama?

No, I’m an economist, remember? I do not fit the stereotype you probably have of extreme breastfeeders and I would be surprised if you find all that many mothers do. I vaccinate my children, I wear pencil skirts and high heels, I ride a motorbike, I can’t sew, I like sex and violence in my TV shows (hello True Blood!), I used disposable nappies (diapers) on my babies, I am an atheist, I have never learnt yoga or meditation, and I am argumentative (so, I really should have taken the time at some point to learn yoga and meditation). I love earth mama types, they’re some of the most generous mothers I know, but I am not one of them.

Do I feel like breastfeeding for so long has taken over my body?

I think this is the number one concern I hear coming out in discussions where certain feminists are sounding a little anti-breastfeeding, and this notion that breastfeeding undermines your bodily integrity is definately what I sense in some of French feminist, Elisabeth Badinter’s work. I can see that breastfeeding may feel that way for some women but for me so much of mothering ‘takes over my body/life’ that it would be difficult to identify exactly which aspects I can attribute to breastfeeding. I hope women aren’t stuck resentfully breastfeeding for months and months because of the pressure to breastfeed, but the truth is, plenty about mothering is done with a little bit of resentment on the side. Breastfeeding can be terribly annoying when you urgently want to get up off this damn bed and get on with something else for the night, but for the most part, breastfeeding is a lazy parent’s best friend.

Motherhood is a very challenging identity for many of us. There’s a huge fear of losing yourself, and your boundaries, and your sex appeal, and your focus and direction, and control over your body when you transform into a mother. Breastfeeding can push all of those buttons. We live in a very misogynist culture. The worst trolling on my blog has always been about calling me a cow and trying to humiliate me about breastfeeding. Clearly, the concept that we can be lactating animals scares the shit out of some of us.

Do I feel forced into breastfeeding for so long by society’s expectation of what the perfect mother should be?

No. I have really, really enjoyed breastfeeding, it’s as simple as that. I understand that not everyone finds breastfeeding to be so nice but for me it has been a very lovely, intimate, relaxing experience. Breastfeeding fills me with love and that’s a nice thing to feel with your children. And for someone like me, who has had a love-hate relationship with their breasts, I have to acknowledge that breastfeeding has been a rather healing experience for my psyche.

Do I feel smug about breastfeeding for so long?

To be honest, I feel kind of embarrassed about breastfeeding for so long. It’s a terrible thing for a feminist mother who advocates for breastfeeding to admit but the stigma attached to breastfeeding kindergarteners (and beyond) is really strong and I have not really outed myself in my writing before as an ‘extreme breastfeeder’. I think that says quite a lot, that a ranty feminist like myself can feel so intimidated by the prejudices against long-term breastfeeding in our culture.

Do I find breastfeeding for so long to be sexual?

Very much not. Three cheers for women who manage to have a discreet orgasm while breastfeeding because they like the sensation so much. There are not enough orgasms in motherhood. But for me, breastfeeding is not a sexual experience. And let me clarify, no mother finds the concept of their child breastfeeding to be a sexual experience; really, they don’t. You might just as well try to convince us that wiping toddler’s bottoms is sexual. So Much No.

Does my child find breastfeeding sexual?

No. He doesn’t find sippy cups sexual either. He’s a little kid and he doesn’t know about anyone finding breasts sexy yet.

Does my partner resent me for breastfeeding for so long?

If I’m going to be really honest here (why not?) – I think he feels a little impatient with the fact that significant amounts of breast-play have been off my menu for a while but he doesn’t feel in any way competitive with his son for my body, and he doesn’t find breastfeeding repulsive, and he doesn’t think my decision to breastfeed is particularly any of his business. (He knows that my breasts belong to me – he successfully went through that developmental stage as a baby).

When will I stop breastfeeding?

Soon, I hope. I am getting a little sick of breastfeeding and the right time for weaning for me is coming soon. Get in now with your questions before I am no longer your local extreme breastfeeder.

(Post-script: my blog is bluemilk.wordpress.com and you can follow me on twitter @bluemilk).