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

Month: August 2012

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.

A Simple Saturday Post: Leave Me Out of Your “Everyone,” Mr. Apatow.

I just wanted to quickly mention the trailer for the new Judd Apatow movie, “This is 40.”

Of course, we all know that Hollywood is guilty of all sorts of offenses all of the time, but it seems rare even today to find one that is quite so up front with its surface-level exclusion. The tagline at the end of the trailer reads: “This is not just their story. This is everyone’s story.”

Please, watch, if you’re so inclined:

(Trigger warnings regarding this trailer: man on a toilet, Megan Fox in underwear, humor about spousal death, anti-aging, inherent anti-lotsa-stuff…)

The trouble, of course, is with the assumption that “everyone” will see some aspect of themselves in this story… a story which appears to be about a wildly wealthy (do you KNOW how much a house like that costs in LA?), white, American-born, middle-aged, thin, conventionally attractive, cissexual, child-rearing, married couple. I’m going to give Mr. Apatow and his corporate marketeers the benefit of the doubt and assume they know not “everyone” will conform to all of those attributes at once, and are trying to make a more general point about the basic similarity of human experience, but even I—a white, cissexual, American-born woman raising a daughter—feel thoroughly alienated and offended by this at just a core level. My heart and stomach clench to wonder how other “everyones” must feel when watching this trailer and getting smacked by that tagline.

It’s obviously impossible to cast aspersions on Mr. Apatow’s film itself– at least until the movie premieres, this will remain a marketing problem– but he is a hugely powerful filmmaker in this town, and I believe it’s fair to say that the tagline came down to him. It represents at the very least a myopic and embarrassing perspective on the world. At worst, it suggests that those with the most privilege in this country are unwilling to even bother extending an invitation to see their new movie to those that aren’t adequately “like them.”

And frankly, in order to chalk up a box office success, they will presumably need more than middle-aged rich white people (traditionally not the most movie-friendly audience out there) to go see their film… So couldn’t they have come up with a slightly less exclusionary pitch?? (I’m kind of seriously asking this, and also leaving the comments section wide open here for complaints, suggestions and heavy-duty snark.)

I am very lenient about humor, and I know what Judd Apatow’s movies are like. Some of his stuff has made me laugh, some has made me cringe, some has made me cringe through laughter or laugh through cringing. In addition, I believe he has every right to tell this story—clearly a personal one—if he chooses to do so. But if his marketing is going to display a level of ignorance this enormous, and work to exclude us so egregiously, then “everyone” can certainly choose not to see it.

New Comments

Just a heads up that we’re introducing threaded comments in an effort to make comment sections more streamlined, and enable commenters to respond directly to each other. I know some folks love threaded comments and some hate them, but we’re trying them out, so… please be patient if you’re in the “I hate them” group. We’re also adding “Guest” designations to our guest bloggers so that it’s clear who’s a regular contributor and who’s guest-posting. Try the comments out, and let us know about issues / bugs / suggestions.

This is Wrong. Breastfeeding Support Groups Should Not Exclude Transgendered Breastfeeding Dads

As someone who has pretty much worked in bureaucracies her whole career I’m fairly patient with protocols and administrative processes, but every now and then I see people stumbling around in ‘red tape’ that has ceased to fulfill a purpose and which is now actively working against the original ideas behind the system, and it makes me feel very exasperated. Because, you know, we can actually change rules and regulations. If it makes sense to change it, and you have the power to change it, then fricking change it.

This is one of those times. La Leche League (LLL) is an amazing organisation and they do terribly vital work but this needs to change.

Milk Junkies is a breastfeeding and attachment parenting blog written by a transgendered dad in a gay relationship who is breastfeeding his baby son. (You should read it, he’s a great writer). On his blog he has been writing about his experiences as a new dad, and particularly, about breastfeeding after having had chest surgery. The writer of this blog, Trevor has had a strong relationship with LLL and now wants to train to become a group leader with the organisation but this is what happened:

In reading, please remember this: I LOVE La Leche League. Its books, meetings and online resources made breastfeeding possible for me. My experiences with my local LLL chapter have been fantastic and I am extremely grateful for this.

It seems that the decision regarding my leadership application comes down to policy: “Since an LLLC leader is a mother who has breastfed a baby, a man cannot become an LLLC Leader.” I understand that I don’t fit into LLL’s definition here, I just think that their definition is poor. I believe that the point of the above statement is that in order to be a leader, you must have breastfed a baby for a certain length of time. It is your experience that counts in peer-to-peer support. At the time the policy was written, the authors assumed that men wouldn’t/couldn’t breastfeed, so they defined a leader as a woman. I kinda doubt that many people envisioned my own scenario. I think that the interpretation of the policy should evolve.

Advice to all organisations seeking social change: whenever you come across someone who faces enormous obstacles of exclusion and yet finds the stamina to pursue a particular interest in being involved with what you’re doing, and what you’re doing is about social change, then you welcome them with open fricking arms. This is someone who brings invaluable drive, perspective and experience to your organisation, and your organisation needs that – because social change is hard work and to be effective it needs to be meaningful. You will not ever get there while excluding those who believe in and share your purpose. If you’re about social change, and this includes governments, then you need to be especially open to adaptation.

If you have to change rules to include them, you change them. This is why I hate Australia’s refugee policy, it’s why I hate the way some states in the US puts homeless, single black mothers in jail for sending their kids to good schools, it’s why I hate certain branches of feminism for persisting with transphobia and it’s why I hate the fact that LLL is excluding a transgendered breastfeeding dad from becoming a group leader.

(I welcome comments on this post but here are two important guidelines.. we will not let this discussion become an anti-LLL thread and nor will we let it become transphobic. As I suggested in my first post at Feministe – we tread lightly in any discussions of mothering/fathering and care work because we need to recognise that we are all walking about on the unpaid toil of others. Further, this particular topic involves an individual family and their lives and they need to be treated with respect).

How Storytelling Saved My Memories

(Trigger warning: shame, drug/alcohol use.)

There are so many things in my life that I used to be ashamed of. I have made mistakes bigger than I ever imagined I would or even could, and I have been through unforeseeable experiences that I wouldn’t wish upon anybody. I am very proud of the person I am now, but some of the stops on the road that got me here… yikes, my friends. Oh my yikes. At times, I’ve been so ashamed by these moments and memories that I’ve elected not to discuss them, analyze them, or even think about them, none of which resolved my sense of mortification and—in some cases—self-loathing. Fortunately, something has recently come into my life to assist with all of this heavy stuff!

Here in LA, consider the storytelling scene a cousin to stand-up comedy. (And, because societies have forever used storytelling to keep a record of their histories, consider it the older cousin.) Los Angeles is a stand-up hub, but storytelling is close behind and gaining speed. With no intentions of ever performing, I was going about my ho-hum existence as waitress-by-day-writer-by-night when a friend of a friend called, more or less out of the blue; she was starting a new storytelling show, and wondered if I would like to participate one night. I decided I did. It went well. She asked if I would like to co-host a refined version of the show with her, attached as a producer and regular performer. I decided I did, and Happy Hour Story Experiment was born.

Before this, my relationship to storytelling revolved around the kitchen table, or the corner of a party, or behind the safety of my writing desk. Everything is different on stage at the Hollywood Bar & Grill. Strangers are there, looking at me! Sure, sometimes they laugh when I expect them to, but other times they just stare. And their silence can be deafening. Sometimes they’re not listening at all because they’re jonesing for another (weirdly watery) martini. And new people are constantly walking in off the street, unaware that there’s a show going on, which is particularly distracting when you’re carefully holding back tears over the loss of a sibling.

The first few weeks, I only read pieces from my old blogs, but they were mostly trivial tales about dating and single momhood. Then I dropped the reading format and started to explore bigger, more dramatic events in my life. I quickly discovered that that this combination—more personal stories with a more physical, freewheeling, anything-can-happen performance style—helped me examine and sort of re-contextualize those events. By actively molding my own memories for an audience, I found that I was creating small pieces of self-mythology; fairy tales, with insightful little morality nuggets. It became an exciting and a comforting way for me to access and analyze my own life, and the shame I carried with me about certain embarrassing choices and events began to dissipate.

Here’s an example, albeit what I consider a slightly more light-hearted one:(WARNING: possibly NSFW on account of language and…grossness?)

(Video description: I am on stage with a microphone describing a very bad night that taught me a lot about my willingness to ask for help. QUESTION: as a guest blogger, am I supposed to transcribe the entire video here for the hearing impaired? How much detail is expected? Please advise. Thanks.)

My own performances notwithstanding, I have become incredibly proud and grateful to be a part of the HHSE. Time and time again, people thank us for creating a safe space to try out new material, to talk about personal experiences, to try out something they’ve otherwise been afraid of for fear of embarrassment. In addition—and I assume it’s because the show is hosted by two females (myself and comedian Melinda Hill)—I am so thrilled by the fact that our performers every week are mostly women coming from all walks of life. Finding a supportive, communal place for female creativity can be extremely difficult, and to be a key part of one feels like a dream come true.

Of course, everyone is allowed to participate, and sometimes the most effective storytellers are not the ones I’m expecting. These are my favorites. One night, an older man wearing drawstring sweatpants tucked into his socks stepped onto the stage. He told a silly story about a recent trip to the petting zoo where he patted a woman’s head because her hair was so frizzy he mistook it for an animal. The man laughed his way through the end of this story, delighted all over again by this hilarious thing that had happened to him. He came alone to our show, and though I have no idea how he heard about us or where he went when he left, I know for sure I’ll never forget him or his little story. He was so sweet I almost wanted to cry. Later the same night, when a woman told us about an epiphany regarding her husband’s Jewish heritage and his parents’ experiences in the Holocaust, I did cry.

Storytelling has the capacity to bring everyone together in celebration of the weird, funny, humiliating, scary, and heartbreaking stories that make up our lives. For me, it has been a key to unlocking my own history, and given me the confidence to attempt new, even more intimidating challenges (hello, Feministe!). The more secure I am with myself, the better a role model I am for my daughter, and the more comfortable I am thinking about the hard conversations that lie ahead for the two of us.

Have you ever turned embarrassing stories or shameful truths into helpful myths of your own? How do you all celebrate community and creative expression? I’d love to know how else I might be able to chase this feeling!

Posted in Fun

The Uncanny Valley of Media Masculinity

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to see people I’m attracted to — really attracted to, people who I’d be attracted to in real life — on my television. Regularly.

The screen is a step away from reality for all of us; TV and movies are vehicles for our fantasies. But my guess is that most people’s responses to those fantasies conform, for the most part, to fundamental real-life truths. Straight women I know will sometimes use entertainment media to flex their homo-curiosity or aesthetic appreciation of other women, but at the end of the day their screen crushes are mostly male.

For me? Entertainment media is an alternate universe in which I am pretty much only attracted to people of a gender I’m not attracted to in real life.

My real-life sexuality is a bit complicated. I purposefully identify as queer, not as gay or lesbian. With my closest friends, the sum of my partners and crushes and flirtations speak for themselves. For the purposes of this discussion, suffice to say that I’m butchsexual: I’m primarily attracted to butch lesbians.* That means I almost never see my real-life partners or crushes or flirtations represented on-screen.

Before I came out to myself at 18, I felt some attraction to men on-screen, but I knew those attractions weren’t as strong as what my straight female friends were feeling. After I came out, those times I’d thought, “All girls sometimes wonder what it would be like to be the man in those Romantic Comedy Kisses, right?” suddenly made a lot more sense. I stopped expecting myself to identify with female romantic leads and feel attraction towards their male counterparts. But since I’m not oriented towards feminine women, I never really started feeling attraction to the women I saw on-screen. I was still more likely to want to be them than to do them.

In college I discovered queer masculinity and realized that I’m really, really into it. I started looking at male romantic leads again, but now I played with mentally genderswapping them, projecting my own burgeoning butch-femme romantic orientation onto everything I watched.

With a couple of my friends I’ve developed an inside joke about Men Who Would Make Good Butch Lesbians. I try to be careful about this, because I’m pretty sure most men have no desire to be butch lesbians, and I respect that. Furthermore, some men have to fight through a lot of bullshit from people thinking they are butch lesbians, and that is not a narrative I want to perpetuate. That’s why it’s an inside joke. Because what we really mean is, “I’m responding to these men as though they were butch lesbians,” or sometimes, “my pantsfeelings would be a lot less confusing if these men were actually butch lesbians.”

I love how subversive that feels. It took me a long time to realize I wasn’t straight, and even longer to realize just how central butchness is to my sexuality. That’s my history, I can’t change it; but I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I believe that mainstream media’s erasure of — indeed, disgust for — masculinity that doesn’t come in a straight cis package helped keep me ignorant of my own sexuality. If I had seen more representations of queer people when I was younger, it might have been easier for me to consider queerness as a possibility for myself. If I had ever seen butches presented as attractive, maybe I would have recognized my attraction to them. Cheese could be your favorite food, but how can you know whether you like it if you’ve never tasted it? Is it any wonder that in the absence of the masculinity I wanted, I gravitated towards the masculinity I was offered? Now that I know what I like, mental genderswapping helps me fill a void. You won’t give me butches? Fine, Patriarchy, I’ll just pretend your men are lesbians. How do you like them apples?

Recently, my screen attractions have taken yet another turn. I’m not sure when it started, but I first noticed it with David Tennant. I thought Christopher Eccleston was absolutely fantastic and I was really, really sorry to see the Ninth Doctor go, but when he regenerated into the Tenth it was like a punch in the gut. Or, you know … lower. As I’ve grown more secure in my queerness and my attraction to queer masculinity specifically, I’ve started developing straight-up attractions to men on-screen.

I freaked a little at first. Did I need to rework my whole understanding of my sexuality? Again? But my absolute disinterest in unqueered masculinity persists in real life, unshakable and unfakeable. So after a couple of weeks of what the fuck, I decided just to embrace it. I do what I do. I like what I like. I have screen-crushes on people who would skeeve me out if they touched me in real life. Whatever!

Which still leaves me with very few representations of people I’d be real-life attracted to. Still leaves me with a major disconnect between my sexuality as I project it onto the fantasy of entertainment, and my sexuality as I experience it as a human being in the world.

The stories we tell each other through entertainment give us alternatives: wanting men or wanting women, being gay or being straight. But the realities of our lives and loves are simultaneously so much more varied and so much more particular than that. When we look to media as a mirror for reality, it can shape us and constrain our power of choice in ways we don’t always see.

This is what happens when the mirror lies. And this is one of the many ways that we, as cultural and creative creatures, adapt.

*This sentence originally read, “I’m attracted to transmasculine folks, especially butches.” The edited version is clearer and more accurate.