We should be talking about breastfeeding, in public

The blog post I wanted to write yesterday in response to the latest ‘breastfeeding debate’ wasn’t about whether people should breastfeed discreetly in public, it wasn’t about whether we need more public awareness of the challenges faced by breastfeeding mothers, it wasn’t about the value of nurse-ins as public protest and it certainly wasn’t about whether ‘breast is best’. Other writers have covered those topics admirably well over the previous few days. (I particularly liked this post from Cristy Clark.) If there is any value at all in this recurring ‘debate’ (why am I even typing the word debate how is this even a topic up for debate I don’t even) it is certainly in the opportunity not only for education on the issues but for discussion of shared experiences and analysis of what it means to undertake the work of mothering whilst encountering casual sexism.

The blog post that was clamouring to be written was rather a response to this piece by Clementine Ford which, in part, took a similar bent to much of the discussion I saw on Twitter. (The latter, if not the former, can be summarised as it’s cool to be pissed off ladies but you know breastfeeding is just not that important an issue, right?)

The post I would have written would not have been for Kochie, but for feminists and feminist allies without children.

It would have said that when you measure the work that mothers do and the limited space in which we do it and find our work, not the space, wanting, you stifle us. When you perceive our passionate response to attack and our grass-roots protests as misguided and distracting, you patronise us. When you need to be reminded that the freedom to use our bodies for birthing and breastfeeding as we wish is as central a human right as the choice not to do these things, you devalue us.

It would have said those things, and more, except that I did not write a blog post yesterday because I was parenting for fourteen hours straight.

My daughter needs me now almost as intensively as she did as an infant. This feels like a challenge and a blessing both; what it does not feel like is a non-issue. Negotiating public spaces with a spirited child feels political. Navigating the world as a queer parent with a family structure that is more unconventional than most is not well-supported and it certainly is not an experience that is discussed with enough nuance in the media. I am not a breastfeeding mother anymore but I still feel an affinity with the experience of women asked to cover up their bodies and their babies; with women and children who are asked to take up less space.

What my partner and I do each day in mothering Bean is explicitly feminist and it is explicitly devalued by much public discourse.

Motherhood is not a niche topic. Our issues, as well as our breasts, have a place in the public sphere. I for one don’t plan to be discreet about that.

The coming out post

Things just fall apart sometimes. Things also fall in to place. Occasionally at the same moment.

Earlier in the year I had Martha Wainwright’s ‘Bloody Motherfucking Asshole’ on frequent rotation in my head. (I was angry, okay?) But my anger was not only directed outward. In that iconic song, Wainwright says

you say my time here has been some sort of joke
that I’ve been messing around
some sort of incubating period
before I really come around

I had been waiting for someone else to say this to me to save me from having to deliver the news to myself. Waiting wasn’t working for me. I sent myself a memo.

The end of a marriage is a public event. People who’d never reached out in support of the couple before suddenly wield opinions. Strangers, Centrelink workers, small-town acquaintances, parents of your child’s friends, your hairdresser, your online connections; any and all of these people might judge you, question you, probe you for weaknesses and blame. Any of them could (and some of them will) ask you, but what about the kid/s? Any or all of them could make it about them; their own pain, their own parents’ failings, their own investment in your coupledom as a kind of talisman for monogamy.

Some people, the ones who always treated you as one part of a boxed set when you were married, will struggle the most.

(Caring about their struggle whilst you’re in the middle of your own pain will register lower on the list of priorities than belting out Martha Wainwright in the shower, by the way.)

There are many reasons I’m not with Bean’s dad anymore and I’m not going to list any of them here.

But I will say what one of them isn’t.

I did not leave my marriage because I’m queer; nor am I queer because I left my marriage. There are a lot of explanations for why I didn’t take the step of talking about the ways in which I do not fit straight until now but, sure, living the Heterosexual Marriage Lifestyle often seemed like such a powerful imperative that there wasn’t much point in finding space for anything else. Wearing a wedding ring was a shibboleth, mentioning my husband when people asked about my pregnancy or later my child, a ticket to social approval. I benefited from heteronormativity even as it erased me, erases me, and people that I love.

That’s painful.

In traditional narratives of coming out, people always ask, when did you know? And the answer is, for me, that I didn’t know and I always knew. I wasn’t able to express and I was always expressing. I was hiding in plain sight and I was never hiding. Perhaps I was never in plain sight.

Critiquing our culture’s narrow way of conceptualising sexuality and gender — and love — has been one of the themes of my parenting and of my writing about parenting. And, not unhappily, it is becoming one of the themes of my life. Because queerness is not a hat I’m trying on. It’s not even about a relationship I’m trying on.

The confessional part is this: I have always been queer. I do not remember a time, from when I began to have romantic and sexual inclinations, that those were exclusively directed at boys and men. But I also do not remember a time during my childhood or teen years where I even had the words and concepts to articulate the ways that I experienced desire and love. Knowing that I liked boys was enough, given the scripts from which I had to choose, to tell me I was not a lesbian. So I wrote my story in straight lines. I’m re-imagining it now, embracing the apocryphal entries, in a mostly positive process. And I want to write the next chapter boldly, even though it’s a little embarrassing for a thirty-something feminist to be only just learning how to express her queerness.

Embarrassment is one thing. Sadness over lost time and estrangement from self is another.

I am here, writing so personally, not only because speaking soothes me, but also because I am angry. I’m angry at the motherfucking assholes who perpetuate violence – both physical and mental – against queer youth. I am angry about the lack of visibility of bisexuality which leads to the relegation of people like me to a footnote, or a punch line.

Most of all I am writing because of this: someone said to me recently that at least Bean will find it easier to come out to her parents if it turns out that she is not heterosexual.

The best we can hope for for our children is not that there will merely be safe ports in the storm for them to reveal their true selves when they have reached a certain age. We can do better than that. We can allow them to express and explore their developing gender identities and sexualities in safety from the very beginning. We can create a world where children don’t ever ‘come out’ to their parents because their parents are witness to unabashed expressions of queer orientation from whenever they emerge. Children can, quite simply, be permitted to be who they actually are. No coercion, no erasure, no shaming.

The ritual of coming out is only a product of the lucrative heteronormative trade in closets. So however Bean comes to express her sexuality in the future, I only hope she uses her wit and loving heart to undermine the closet business that trapped her mother for so long. The rest of the story is up to her.

Breastfeeding support: less is not more

It’s been a bad weekend for media representations of breastfeeding.

Saturday’s Age and SMH ran a feature in the Good Weekend supplement detailing French feminist Elisabeth Badinter’s opposition to what she sees as the tyranny of motherhood, especially physically demanding practices like breastfeeding. Like Hanna Rosin’s, Badinter’s views on breastfeeding have been carefully deconstructed over the past few years by other writers. Take this piece by blue milk:

But then you can’t entirely blame feminists like Badinter for being nervous about any ambitions to elevate motherhood either. They haven’t seen much good come out of the institution of motherhood for women – servitude, guilt, martyrdom, rampant biological determinism and invisibility. Still, given that most women end up being mothers, and given that a good deal of us even strongly desire motherhood there is no point throwing that particular baby out with the bath water. We won’t elevate women anytime soon by denigrating motherhood.

Make no mistake — denigrating physiologically normal (though by no means universal) processes of motherhood, like the physical changes of pregnancy and birth and the work of breastfeeding, is denigrating motherhood. It is also, I think, a mistake to underestimate the level of maternal desire driving some of our choices. But more than this; assuming that the holy grail of feminism is solely an ability to centre paid work, alternative achievements and other relationships in women’s lives (as men have always been able to under patriarchy) is extremely limiting. Why not instead seek new ways of working, earning, living, doing mothering and making families which enable choices to stretch beyond the starkness of:  A) bottle feeding and long daycare or B) long unrewarded hours at home in an isolated mother–child dyad?

Those long hours alone can be devastating for a new mother’s mental health; I know this from experience. Even when a parent has company of some kind, they may feel figuratively alone if their actions are not supported with both compassionate reassurance and practical assistance. This is the concern raised by Beyond Blue’s deputy chief executive Nicole Highet who was quoted in The Mercury today. Dr Highet isn’t wrong in saying that breastfeeding difficulties and anxiety about feeding choices can contribute to the stress and even despair felt by many new mothers. In the early days and weeks breastfeeding is difficult for most (impossible for some) and severely overworked (because that is what they usually are!) post-partum women are particularly vulnerable to feelings of inadequacy. The physical pain of cracked nipples, mastitis, thrush or engorgement is all too real. So is the emotional pain of being confronted with choices which seem patently unfair and yet take on the importance of life-or-death decisions. Mothers in our culture are bombarded with all manner of ‘expert opinions’ and given the distinct impression that everyone — health professional or self-styled baby whisperer or mother in law — knows our babies’ needs better than we do and yet, somehow, when it comes down to getting the actual work of mothering done the buck stops with us. And when it comes to taking the fall for choices that are made, it’s all mothers all the time.

When was the last time you saw the mainstream media ask for fathers to step up and do something about low breastfeeding rates?  (Research shows that a male partner’s attitudes towards and willigness to assist with breastfeeding is the single biggest determinant of whether a woman will continue to exclusively breastfeed once she has left hospital, but strangely it’s mothers who are always targeted when feeding choices have to be accounted for.)

Although I completely deplore the employment of the term ‘Breastapo’ in that inflammatory Mercury piece, it’s important to acknowledge that the trend Beyond Blue has picked up on is real. Some women are, for whatever reason, experiencing pressure or negative attitudes about their feeding choices and that is harmful, both to those individual women and to the cause of lactivism generally.

Dr Highet and many others (including Leslie Cannold who tweeted the Mercury piece this morning) seem to take the experiences of women who felt that breastfeeding advocacy or advice given in hospital was shaming in some way as evidence that the ‘breast is best’ message has gone too far. I tend to draw the opposite conclusion.

At the moment, mothers (and actually when I say this, I mean mothers in the ‘Western’ world) seem to experience a particularly insidious form of blame-shifting. Women are told, usually repeatedly, by health professionals that breastfeeding is the best ‘choice’, and the vast majority believe it. (Over 90 % of Australian women choose to initiate breastfeeding). Breastfeeding advice, in many cases, seems to constitute little more than a bit of information about how to do it and a very clear intimation that it’s what good mothers do. What it all too often doesn’t include is sensitive, individualised, and knowledgable information delivered in a mother-centred way. What it definitely doesn’t come with (if it’s being delivered by a health professional or, well, just about anyone) is actual real-life support to achieve the mother’s breastfeeding goals.

In short: most women hope to breastfeed. Most women are let down by a lack of practical support.

Complicating the picture is marketing from formula companies and ingrained cultural practices (like expecting babies to ‘sleep through’ or feed by the clock and expecting mothers not to feed openly in public) which make breastfeeding seem like perhaps the ‘best’ but not at all the ‘normal’ choice to make.

By the time a woman has been ground down by the sheer exhaustion of birth and her first week of overworked parenthood, ‘normal’ can seem pretty good. ‘Normal’ can seem attainable.

This makes me sad not because I am a genocidal fascist who wants to see mothers suffer through mastitis (for crying out loud, can we just stop with the Boob Nazi slurs?) Rather, I feel saddened by the alarming regularity at which women give up their desire to breastfeed because breastfeeding is not the ‘best’ way to feed babies. It’s the normal way.

The idea that breastfeeding is somehow extraordinary persists because we live in a culture where very limited paternity leave is normal, where an expectation to continue cooking and cleaning and exercising and socialising in the post partum weeks and months is normal, and where a perception that unpaid work (especially if it is physical and monotonous) is pointless drugdgery is normal.

What good breastfeeding advocacy has to offer mothers is more than admonishments and informational pamphlets. Breastfeeding advocacy is at its core advocacy for mothers and babies, and although many of the people doing it do not identify as feminists, their organisations frequently do work which could be described as feminist.

I find it odd when people choose to promote women’s choices by standing against grass roots lactivism. Organisations such as the Australian Breastfeeding Association and La Leche League are run by mothers, for mothers. They grew out of a need, identified by women who were living in the era of Betty Friedan, for woman-to-woman support. Volunteers run them, they do not make profits, and they can’t pay for the kind of lobbying and marketing that formula manufacturers buy each day before breakfast. In short; I don’t think they’re the enemy.

If mothers are experiencing pain and anguish from ‘all the pressure to breastfeed’ I think we need to be asking why, and certainly, we need to ensure that any breastfeeding advocacy is sensitive and shame-free. But I have a feeling that less support for and information about breastfeeding is not what will help Beyond Blue’s cause. (And not only because breastfeeding hormones can sometimes help stave off depression, although this was my experience.)

What we need are real choices, not rock-and-hard-place compromises. And for that to be possible, much more needs to change than the message they put on posters in the maternity ward waiting room.

Panic over pretty

At almost four years of age, Bean is developing a keen sense of how to determine which are socially appropriate expressions of gender. She already has a clear idea of some fashion ‘rules’, and she is beginning to notice differences in bodies and style of dress with astute regularity. I have no doubt that much of this socialisation into appearance-based judgement is coming from daycare, with its school-yard-like hiearchy systems and proto-cliques.

Bean has been bullied over her hairstyle. She loves to express herself through her clothing choices but I know that very often she considers whether her friends would approve of an outfit before venturing out in it.

All of these things are no doubt familiar to other parents and I am not the first or last feminist mother to wish that there was a picture book version of The Beauty Myth distributed to every small child. Although it hurts me that bullying behaviours focused on looks are hitting my daughter so young, I am also conscious of the need for perspective. I don’t want to squash her enjoyment of clothes or criticise her desire to ‘dress up’ or think about colour combinations or choose, sometimes, to be frivolous. My own explorations of fashion and style were laughed at and squashed and this didn’t have the intended effect; I didn’t learn that clothing doesn’t matter. I learned that it really does matter, but that only ‘pretty’ girls get to fully partake.

Is it possible that fear of ‘pinkification’ could also backfire on girls?

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of commentary promoting the idea that girls must strive for goals more worthy than prettiness; that instead of aiming for a celebrity look or a certain body weight, girls should be focusing on meaningful aims like career achievement and wholesome personality attributes. It’s well meaning and often exactly right.

But I fear there’s an underlying failure of understanding in some of this commentary.

Celebrity culture, weight consciousness, ‘sexy’ fashions, beauty ideals — these all impact upon young people. We know this — many of us revile this, and yearn for better role models and more diverse options, particularly for girls (although it is clear that all genders suffer from pressure to attain some superficial standard of acceptability).

But I simply do not believe that conventionally attractive is all that girls want to be.

Bean wants to be pretty — she wants to fit in, she wants praise for how she looks. But she doesn’t state ‘pretty’ as an ambition. She wants to drive a fire truck. She wants to be a doctor. She wants to be a mother.

I am frustrated by platitudes urging girls (or rather, urging mothers with daughters) to aim beyond pretty mainly because I don’t think pretty is actually viewed as a viable lifestyle choice. It’s viewed as a prerequisite for, or an easy route to, where girls actually want to go.

The fantasy of being thin (so beautifully explained in Screw Inner Beauty) is a familiar concept around the fatosphere. At its core, the fantasy of being thin is about denying the possiblities (and limitations) of the present reality in favour of (often literally) buying the rhetoric around what weight loss can bring. It’s the idea that if only something magical happened, all those other things could be possible. For those caught in the thrall of the fantasy of being thin, it’s not so much about the weight loss as it is about the new job, the new relationship, the overseas holiday, the devoted lover/s, the fabulous wardrobe, the one-day-I-will-be-worthy-of-all-this achievement. Very few people want to lose weight because they believe that a smaller dress size will, in itself, make them happy. They want what has been co-opted to sell them the diet shakes in the first place; they want their dreams.

The push to be pretty is not so different.

Girls are lead to believe that pretty finishes first. That attractiveness will help them gain popularity. That success comes with a bright smile and a fashionable haircut and definitely without acne or wonky teeth or stretchmarks or ill-fitting hand-me-down clothes.

Beauty is, perhaps, its own reward. I wouldn’t know.

But I do know that young people are not so vacuous and shallow. They don’t often have the extreme gullibility actually required to discount goals like career and family in favour of the pursuit of prettiness. Rather, they know, perhaps instinctively, perhaps because the teasing starts as soon as their peers are verbal, that what they actually desire may be easier to grasp if they can master the feat of being aesthetically pleasing whilst doing it.

I agree with Pigtail Pals that we need to show girls that they can be scientists, gymnasts, doctors, builders, writers. I agree with the amazing John Darnielle that Lego does girls a disservice when it regurgitates marketing hype about what girls want instead of catering to their needs as individual children unfettered by rigid gender roles.

It’s important to advocate for a rejection of the limitations of ‘pink’ and ‘pretty’ without patronising young people.

Like the fantasy of being thin, the desire to be pretty is backed by a multi-billion dollar industry and untold numbers of daily encounters with people who’ve swallowed the social pressures whole and made them their own mission to prescribe. Girls who desire a piece of the pretty pie aren’t misguided, inherently frivolous or lacking in ambition. They want to do stuff; it’s just they’ve internalised the message that they must look good doing it for it to count for anything.

And that is why the right to be ugly — the right to do and be without being gazed upon and always found wanting — is worth defending.

The right to be ugly

If you haven’t yet read this wonderful piece from Masterchef winner Julie Goodwin in response to mean-spirited tabloid critiques of her body, go read it now. I’ll wait.

With her defence of ‘broader people’, Julie Goodwin has set herself apart from other media personalities who are all too often keen to self-flagellate about their failure to attain physical perfection. This is delightfully sensible and refreshing; I hope the huge support she seems to have received is reflective of a tiny shift in consciousness about both body image and health.

Even so, I heartily wish that there was no imperative for women to do the magazine-covershoot-swimsuit-reveal in the first place. When can a woman get a break from being judged on whether she looks fuckable in her bathers? How is her body shape even relevant to what Goodwin does, and who she is? But we are still in thrall of the suffering ween, apparently (sigh), as well as the stand-in scrutiny provided by other women.

This profoundly-felt obligation to be pretty, this imperative to commit time and money and energy towards some ever-shifting and always unattainable (because not even models look like models) beauty ideal — it isn’t going away. I’m already noticing its toxic effects on Bean, and that’s heartbreaking.

Unfortunately, what passes for commentary on body image issues in popular media generally takes for granted the scrutiny of women’s appearance as right and proper, if inconvenient. I used to indulge in a little Oprah from time to time, and I sometimes liked it, too. If there was one thing that Oprah was good at it was the promotion of public displays of emotional vulnerability. But every time Oprah was about to well up, she’d make some crack about ‘the ugly cry’. When the cameras are rolling, one can’t be ugly. No matter how ‘real’ and raw the moment is supposed to be, we can’t have any screwed-up-face-mascara-running ugliness, at least not without self-deprecation thrown up as a shield. Emotions are good, seemed to be the message, but women can never, ever, let up on themselves when it comes to appearance.

It’s okay to have confronting feelings so long as you stay cute, folks.

I’ve been thinking about the ugly cry a lot lately; it’s a pernicious example of how women’s behaviour is constrained by the imperative to ‘look good’, as well as by ingrained notions of feminine conduct. Grooming protocols and fashion policing, it seems to me, are closely related to decorum and manners and, well, come along with a whole lot of sexist (and racist, ableist, classist) baggage. They also rely upon a false dichotomy between beauty and ugliness and fail to allow space for interrogating the very notion that appearance matters.

A lot of fat activism centres around fat visibility; the message that fat people exist and have the right to take up space is pivotal. More than that, the notion that a fat body can be beautiful and desirable is at the core of some body positive work. And these things are important. But there is, I think, a deeper cultural problem here that can’t be solved just by widening (literally, even!) the definition of beauty.

Sometimes, frequently, I have no interest in attaining any standard of beauty. It’s not churlishness: yeah, I don’t meet any aesthetic ideal and I’ve been derided often over the years for exhibiting various forms of ugliness. And sometimes that has hurt. But my interest in exploring the potential for the reclamation of ugly is not merely personal.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel that I had some kind of obligation to be, if not pretty, then passable. Palatable. And if not that, then invisible.

In taking a kinder, more accepting disposition towards my physical self, I am finding that I feel rather invested in my right to be ugly. And I am far less critical of others. Letting go of any judgement about ugliness means it can start to look kinda beautiful, too.

That’s why I’ve enjoyed Definatalie’s explorations of Ugly Cute.

Sometimes, refusing to hide (or hide from) my ugly might be about finding a safe space in invisibility, or it might be about nothing more than pleasing my own damn self by privileging comfort over appearance or prioritising self-expression over fashion. Or sometimes, it’s political. It’s here I am, don’t erase me. Here I am, don’t judge me. Interrogating one’s own choices with regard to personal presentation is a little exhausting and it can be excruciatingly boring, too. But I think it’s important work for feminists — for anyone — to undertake from time to time.

None of us has an obligation to be conventionally attractive. We all have the right to let go of, if only briefly, the imperative to strive.

Letting yourself be enough, just as you are; now that is a beautiful thing.

Maternal desire

Cross-posted at Feministe

I have identified as a feminist for about fifteen years but I’ve only really understood what that meant, to me, in the last three. Because of my relative privilege I am somewhat sheltered from the worst effects that kyriarchy can have — has — on families. But I became acutely aware even before my daughter was born that my convictions were going to be tested more than ever by the experience of motherhood.

As I wrote in Feminist Mothers, there are still many ways that becoming a mother is (generally) a socially sanctioned choice in the culture in which I live. And insofar as it is a choice (we know very well that not every parent chose to be a parent or chose the circumstances or timing!) it is generally sanctioned by feminists as well. We have the right to choose, right?

And yet, the desire to have children and to spend time with those children, the yearning for it, even if that means having one’s career or other markers of ‘freedom’ and ‘success’ eclipsed by child-rearing, still gets kind of a bad rap from some feminists. Or rather, perhaps it’s become a bit of an unmentionable. It’s not uncommon for high-profile feminists to characterise babies and children as little tyrants. Freedom-suckers, equality-trashers, self-actualisation deniers. And whether they intend to or not, this often leads to a characterisation of middle and upper-class mothers, particularly those who choose to practise a form of attachment parenting, as selfishly indulgent, or tragically duped and downtrodden, or both.

This doesn’t come from everybody. Asserting that choice means that the owner of a uterus has the right to say yes as well as no to pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding is important to many, I know.

And yet.

I think sometimes this dismissive attitude towards certain types of parenting is just a slightly more genteel manifestation of a latent fear and loathing of mothers, of maternal bodies, of any woman who doesn’t conform to ‘what women want’ or appears to conform too closely to ‘what women want’. This is otherwise known as misogyny.

A while back a joke about Michelle Duggar circulated amongst some friends of mine, some of whom self-identified as feminists. It included the words ‘vagina’ and ‘clown car’. Add that to the ‘humour’ leveled at Nadya Suleman, and it becomes pretty clear that in my culture, women who willingly choose lots and lots of babies are treated as a heady blend of ridiculous and monstrous. A slur about clown car vaginas can hurt any person with a large family or multiples and, frankly, it’s awful. It doesn’t need to be said that it’s pretty anti-feminist. (I’m not endorsing the choices of Duggar and Suleman here, beyond saying that as a pro-choice feminist I believe their bodies are their own, their wombs are their own. Some critiques of the phenomena attached to these women may well be legitimate but there is no value in shifting critiques, even obliquely or accidentally, onto all women who have or desire to have a lot of children. And there’s definitely something wrong with humour that implies maternal bodies are gross.)

Does this treatment of women who are especially fecund belie attitudes to mothering and childbearing in general?

I have heard, more than once, young women describe themselves as ‘bad feminists’ for aspiring to motherhood. I don’t think this is only because of ingrained notions of feminism meaning a focus on career and financial independence (although feminism sometimes still means these things and that’s not always a bad thing.) I think it’s also because women who love babies are liable to be stereotyped as ditzy, unambitious or sentimental at best. Sometimes they are seen as emotionally voracious or, well,gross.

Perhaps part of the problem is a lack of articulation of what it is like to want children, and the ways in which this interacts with one’s feminism. Although my approach to motherhood is quite cerebral, my experience of maternal desire and ultimately maternity was very much in the body. The experience of childbirth was for me transformative and empowering but it is not easy to convey that convincingly without sinking into cliche. Breastfeeding my daughter taught me more about misogyny, feminism, community, consent and a million other things that I could never have imagined. It made me want to write poetry (and a blog) about milk! But how does one put the physicality of parenting up to the spotlight, without fueling terribly harmful essentialising narratives? How do you stand in awe of the experience of parenthood without teetering towards being a ‘bad feminist’? (You don’t pretend for a second that your experience is universal, is the short answer, I think.)

Perhaps what we need is more interrogation of these experiences in unexpected places. Parents — mostly mothers — are often accused of being boring. What is infuriating about that is that we are saddled with this label without regard to the societal forces which might make this so. Mothers are frequently left with all the extra work but little of the recognition and then reviled for even the slightest sign that we are living ‘vicariously’ through our kids. Additionally, parents and non-parents often peel off into cliques, partly because we have been herded into distinct consumer groups, and because we are encouraged to keep to discrete family groupings in a culture where individualism is prized. And online we can be confronted with twee marketing-laden speak (‘momversations’ — ew) which, frankly, puts me off too, in place of real dialogue between women who may or may not be mothers.

‘Boring’ is often shorthand for someone whose passions do not match one’s own. But when the day-to-day reality for many women is mothering, it makes sense that a passion for women’s rights is aided by an insight into parenthood.

I am hopeful that we will find new ways to negotiate the experiential divide between parents and those without children, especially in feminist spaces. I hope that ‘admitting’ to either a desire to mother or to be child free can be less loaded, less fraught, more free in all kinds of spaces. And I hope that we can come to more readily expect not only the right to choose, but the right to be actively and meaningfully supported in each instance.

Guest post at Feministe: Feminist mothers

Cross-posted at Feministe.

A few weeks ago an article by Clem Bastow, writer and feminist, was published in two major newspapers here in Australia, and subsequently responded to in op eds and countless blogs. In her piece Why having a baby is not the pinnacle of a woman’s life, Bastow wrote frankly of her lack of maternal desire and the ways in which she is judged for her choice to be childless.

As my 20s have run themselves out, the line of questioning from extended family members has shifted from “Are you seeing anyone?” to “And what about kids?” I’m 29 today and I expect the urgency with which the question is delivered to only increase once next year’s birthday rolls around.

Her piece struck a chord. Immediately I noticed a flurry of tweets praising what was perceived to be her bravery in speaking out about the pressures on women to conform to the maternity track. Given that it’s only a year since Chally wrote here about our former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd commenting on the responsibility of women to set aside time for childbearing, it’s pretty clear that the judgements Bastow wrote about are real. It’s no surprise that many young feminists felt her piece spoke for them. In a mainstream media filled with schmaltzy references to maternity and the message that the path to fulfillment is heterosexual breeding bliss, voices like hers need to be heard.

But there was another kind of flurry in my tweet stream. A lot of the people I follow who blog primarily about parenting were perturbed, not so much by Bastow’s piece itself (I didn’t see anyone asserting that the choice not to have children is not valid) but by the strength of the FUCK YES! response it was getting. There was an implication in the surrounding discourse that the pressure to have children was coming from, or at least upheld by, women who were mothers. And there was also a clear implication that pursuing career and creativity is still requisite on remaining child free, at least for a good long period. It had a whiff of old conflicts about it, and I’m not surprised that there was uneasiness.

Unfortunately, (though unsurprisingly, given the way news sites generally go) some of the comments on the article were hateful, amounting to either (and I’m paraphrasing) ‘this is why feminism is responsible for everything that is wrong with the world’ or ‘what would you know about life choices, you selfish, barren, immature slut?’ As the writer pointed out on Twitter, it was striking that much of the negativity appeared to come from mothers, when she had explicitly not criticised anyone’s choice to have children.

I suspect Bastow didn’t fully anticipate the effect of raising any issue which carries a ‘mummy war’ vibe. I know from my interest in breastfeeding advocacy that when it comes to any sensitive question about which parents are impassioned, defensiveness and anger are easily stirred. It’s common to blame teh over-emotional wimmenz for this state of affairs but clearly, when a group of people are operating in an environment where societal judgement is harsh, swift and has serious consequences, as modern parents are, it is too simplistic to condemn all such over-reactions. Because whilst Bastow is absolutely right that childbearing is a socially sanctioned choice (for straight, partnered, cis women), what wasn’t within the scope of her piece to address was the ways in which that choice remains unsupported in real terms.

It’s one thing to be handed a cookie for breeding. It’s entirely another thing to be handed actual, concrete assistance, understanding, and genuine respect for one’s mothering and sadly the latter is too rarely in evidence at a societal level. Importantly, there are many parents who get no cookies because they do not meet the criteria of ‘good parent’; that is, they dare to have children whilst being poor, or disabled, or non-white, or queer, or trans, or too young, or too old, or too fat.

I certainly agree with Bastow’s assertion that in the mainstream media the voices of women who are childless by choice are frequently distorted or silenced. But her piece did not speak to me. I feel that, in the spaces in which I move online — in feminist spaces — there is no bravery required to ‘admit’ that one doesn’t want to have children. Rather, there is often a privileging of the voices of non-mothers. There is a continued emphasis on feminism’s relationship to a kind of personal freedom that apparently comes with career, economic success and time that is one’s own: all things that theoretically can be achieved with a baby at your breast and a toddler on your hip but which, portrayals imply, rarely are. In discourse about reproductive rights there is an emphasis on abortion and contraception which far overshadows discussion of fertility treatments, birth choices and breastfeeding rights even though these are also intimately tied up with the core concern of bodily autonomy. In considering the role of blogging in social justice, there is often a devaluing or erasure of those who write about babies and children. The term ‘mummy blogger’ is infantilising, dismissive, and all-too ubiquitous.

I want to remind everyone that there are many fantastic writers who are blogging about the intersection of feminism and parenting. As the series on feminist motherhood hosted by fellow Australian and fellow milk, blue milk, attests, parenting is a rich seam to mine for feminist gold. But it is mostly other parents who comment on (and presumably read) parenting-focused blogs. Obviously, the blogs you read do not ultimately define you but if you’re into feminist blogs and never choosing those which focus on parenting, at all, ever? I think that needs to be challenged.

The intersections of social justice, parenting, child rights and family are — or should be — central feminist concerns. I don’t think it’s okay to leave birth and breastfeeding rights as a fringe issue, one usually only discussed by uterus-having people who’ve already given birth. I don’t think it’s okay to perpetuate negative stereotypes about motherhood or particular parenting ‘trends’ in feminist spaces, although this is a thing which still happens. And I really don’t think it’s okay to leave the task of raising and looking out for the interests of children almost solely up to to parents when we’re talking about the next generation here. The incoming wave of feminists.

Here is just a very small sample of posts of parenting interest from great bloggers. If these blogs aren’t already on your reading list, please check them out.
Why attachment parenting needs feminism by blue milk
Feminist readers, have you leveled up? at Underbellie

Extended breastfeeding in Islam by wood turtle
Sex education and my son at Womanist Musings
Dear Erica Jong at Raising My Boychick

And please share other links in the comments, too.

Dads, not designed to help

You know what shits me to tears? (You know that’s a great colloquialism right there, up there with ‘flat out like a lizard drinking, amirite?)

Anyway, you know what really, really does?

The devaluing, infantilising and otherwise off-the-hook-letting of fathers. The implication that notions of equal parenting and dads mucking in to do their share around the house are silly feminist pipe-dreams dreamed up by silly women who really should have better things to do. Like have babies. Because in Advertising Land at least, women who’ve had babies know to stop faffing around with such fantasies and just accept the reality that menfolk are rubbish at housework so they might as well knuckle down and do it all themselves. Otherwise, when the dreaded question is posed, they’ll come up wanting. (The most pressing of dreaded questions, of course, is ‘what does your loo say about you?’ in Advertising Land. And we don’t want it to say ‘relies too heavily on a naturally-incompetent male’ now do we, ladies. Amirite?)

Here’s a particularly execrable tourist brochure from Advertising Land.

(The ‘Designed to Help’ ad campaign for Sunbeam appliances. Features fathers and bonus! teenaged boy being unhelpful around the house by variously: leaving the fridge door open, ironing flat the pleats in a little girls’ skirt, and opening the oven when a souffle is baking. The featured people are all pale-skinned, thin, conventionally attractive, and their homes are modern and spookily clean. The women have long-suffering, patronising expressions. The menfolk are infuriatingly clueless. The little girl is hopeful, then devastated. Clearly she should learn to iron herself, I mean, skirts are too much for dads to manage.)

And just in case you were thinking you could avoid this crap by avoiding commercial TV, here’s an actually published book which people are allegedly paying actual money for. That’s from the Real World, people.

Be afraid.

When loathing feels normal, don’t buy it.

I had a haircut for the first time in months yesterday, and that meant sitting in the feminized space that is a suburban hair salon and being offered dog-eared magazines.

I’ve never been a major consumer of women’s magazines but I was relatively familiar with them in the past; at school we shared issues of Girlfriend and Cosmopolitan around the dorms, and later I had the spare change for a glossy, gossipy bit of escapism from time to time. Even after I became so fed-up with the sexism and sizeism (and the bunch of other isms) underpinning mainstream magazines that I no longer spent money on them, I still had regular hair appointments and colleagues who’d bring stuff to thumb at lunchtime. The fashion, body, health and behavioural coding in these publications was familiar and, though I actively questioned it, insidiously normalized.

What I mean is, even though I thought it was demeaning to be presented with yet another ‘article’ on some famous woman’s weight fluctuations, on some level I accepted that kind of discourse as normal. Ubiquity lent it a sense of inevitability.

Lately there has been less time for haircuts but also, thanks to the paths blogging has led me down, an even keener media literacy when it comes to body policing and misogyny.

And I have to say, when I was confronted with publications where every cover story is – surprise! – about a woman’s weight ‘battle’, I realized how thoroughly I have moved beyond the normalization of such commentary. In fact the word that sprang to mind was ‘alien’ — these images and articles are alienating, yes, but now they also strike me as foolish, disturbing and truly bizarre.

Hyper-vigilance about the weight of not only ourselves but complete strangers is not, and happily does not need to be, normal. It is disappointing that celebrities continue to answer invasive and pointless questions about their weight, eating and exercise habits but downright infuriating that media outlets continue to demand these responses as fodder for their body-obsessed publications. And, to once again employ a word that I try to use sparingly, it is bizarre that in 2011 we accept the submission to such scrutiny as a normal part of a famous woman’s job.

I used to flick through those magazines with either disdain, vague envy or mild annoyance. Yesterday I chose not to even glance through more than a few pages. I was bored by the same old conflicting and constraining messages. Excluded by the homogeneity. Confused by the failure of the media to find new, modern discourses.

But mostly I felt happy. I no longer need to perform the standard magazine flick-through as part of my engagement with femininity or fashion. I know what those publications are offering, I know I don’t want it, and I know where to look for what I do want.

This doesn’t mean I don’t consider the media to have a responsibility to represent diversity and consider body image concerns (they do, and they’re failing to live up to it much of the time). We need change. Saying ‘if you don’t like it don’t buy it!’ is a pretty disingenuous approach to the problems of sexist and body-shaming media.

But yesterday was a reminder that I personally don’t like it, so I don’t buy it. I don’t emulate it by policing the bodies of others, famous or otherwise. And that feels pretty good, actually.

Gender according to Bean, 3 years

On aspirations: When I grow up I want to be man.

Okay, how come?

So I can go to work like Daddy. And drive a fire truck.

At the moment, do you want to be a boy or a girl?

I want to be a girl, because I want to play nicely with my friends.

***

On anatomy: Daddy doesn’t have a vulva. That’s funny.

***

On trains and relationships: James [the engine] is a little bit upset. He needs to go and talk to Thomas about something, and then he’ll feel better.

***

On careers: What is that lady [in the book] doing?

She’s a teacher. I’m a teacher too.

I could be a teacher when I grow up.

Do you want to be a teacher like mummy when you grow up?

No, I don’t think so! I want to be a Work Man.

***

Upon reading 10 000 Dresses: Bailey is sad because her mummy says: ‘you’re not a girl Bailey, you’re a boy!’ and they say ‘Go away!’. But I think she is a girl … ’cause she feels like a girl.

***

On pinkness: I like pink because E [girl at childcare] says it’s the best colour!

***

Upon seeing a big red tractor slashing grass: Mummy I am going to get a tractor. It will be small so I can put it inside. And it will be pink. I will cut the grass with it so Daddy doesn’t have to cut the grass.

***

On International Women’s Day:  I’m wearing green and purple because it’s International Women’s Day today. That’s a day for girls and women like us. Do you want to wear green and purple too?

Okay! I will wear green and purple and PINK!

(And she did)

Purple, green and a splash of pink sparkles