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.

The wrong prescription?

A suggestion from Dr. Jennifer James, a midwifery lecturer at RMIT University, has been inflaming parenting message boards and blogs all over today. Dr. James has been quoted in the main stream media about her proposal to remove infant formula from supermarket shelves and make it a prescription-only product.

I’m at least sympathetic to the idea: I can certainly see potential benefits to breastfeeding rates. Perhaps, in principle it seems similar to proposals to put cigarettes in plain packaging as a way to stop companies from marketing their products to consumers.

Except, infant formula is not tobacco.

Parents choose to use formula for a myriad of reasons (some of which feel little like actual choices) and the overwhelming feeling amongst commenters on the article and parents on Twitter seems to be that this is a push to make formula use taboo. Some parents who formula feed already feel they are shamed for it, and this feeling can result in a backlash against organisations who promote breastfeeding, like the Australian Breastfeeding Association. This proposal would likely only make the guilt-shame-anger cycle worse.

On the other hand, parents who have clear medical reasons for not breastfeeding might well feel vindicated by a prescription – they are less likely to be shamed or questioned, perhaps, if others readily assume that there is a ‘good reason’ for them not to choose breastfeeding. But I don’t think that’s a sound argument for supporting James’ idea; in fact, I think it just raises more questions.

What constitutes a ‘good reason’ to stop breastfeeding or supplement with formula? Who decides that? Why should it be any one’s but the breastfeeding parent’s right to decide what kind of reasons are ‘good enough’? What happens if an individual parent’s reasons are not good enough for a given health professional? Does that amount to forcing someone to breastfeed, or forcing them to find other (potentially less safe) ways to feed their baby? What happens if someone who is wanting help to persist with breastfeeding is issued a formula prescription by a health professional? Would that appear to amount to a directive to use formula? Would formula companies respond by marketing even more aggressively to health professionals, many of whom already know little about breastfeeding and how to support it? What would removing supermarket competition do to the cost of formula and how would that impact on low-income families, who are disproportionately dependent on commercial baby milk? How would it affect the availability of alternative feeding methods for parents who face literacy or language barriers or who have economic or other reasons for not seeing health professionals? How many babies would be fed cows’ milk as a stop-gap measure? I think that constitutes too many unanswered questions for this proposal to be something I could get behind.

I agree that the marketing of formula, including (especially) toddler milk, is not nearly well enough controlled and I believe that is to the detriment of breastfeeding rates. I think that the ready availability of formula and easy brand recognition combined with poor support for, and education about, breastfeeding contribute to lowering breastfeeding rates. The WHO code, which should be the minimum standard for regulating formula marketing, isn’t enforced in Australia, nor in much of the world. (Both links PDFs) And as a feminist I have a problem with that: women are being marketed to in the name of ‘choice’ to the potential detriment of our health and that of our children. As a lactivist I obviously have a problem with the marketing of infant formula and any implication that it is as good as, or better than, breast milk. But as a human being I also know that people are hurt, seriously hurt, when they feel judged and shamed and when they are exhaustedly holding a hungry, crying, baby at 2:30 am and it feels like no one can help them.

Removing systemic barriers to breastfeeding certainly may require improved measures to reduce the popularity of formula – popularity which can be attributed to decades of marketing not only to the public but to health professionals. A big part of that marketing is about convenience: huge displays in chemist shops and regular sales at the supermarket of products in familiar-looking tins add to the impression of ease of use and the normalisation of artificial feeding. But whether we like it or not, formula and its ready availability is important to many families. Removing that now feels like a stick where a carrot should be.

Give parents the tools to make sound decisions that benefit them and their babies. Give parents not only choices, but supported, realistic choices. Don’t tell a woman who has to go out of the home to work, or who has other children to look after and little support, that the choice to dedicate perhaps days to increasing her milk supply through frequent feeding and skin-skin contact to avoid supplementing with formula is an easy one: it clearly is not. Education and information are hugely important but they are only part of the picture when practical barriers still so often interfere with breastfeeding relationships.

Adding practical barriers to formula use, as I think this proposal would, isn’t a particularly kind way to help parents. Being caught between a rock and a hard place doesn’t make the rock seem any easier to budge: it just makes it hurt more to be stuck there.

***
Edit: The Herald Sun article I linked to (and some discussion I’ve seen elsewhere) implies that the Australian Breastfeeding Association is supportive of the proposal to make formula prescription-only. That’s misleading: the Association’s statement to the media on the comments by Dr James was:

The idea of obtaining formula on prescription is worth serious discussion although the Australian Breastfeeding Association is not currently advocating this. Research shows formula fed infants are more likely to become ill so being in contact with a health professional could be very beneficial. A health professional could counsel the mother, address any breastfeeding problems and help the mother make an informed decision. Many of the calls to the Australian Breastfeeding Association 24 hour helpline are about reassuring mothers about their milk supply, feed frequency and normal baby behaviour. For example mothers often think they have an inadequate milk supply when baby cluster feeds in the evening however this is normal baby behaviour. Sore nipples, mastitis and attaching the baby to the breast are also very common calls. Over 90% of mothers start out breastfeeding by 6 months only 50% are partially or fully breastfeeding, many more would continue with better support and information.
Australian Breastfeeding Association supports a ban on marketing of Infant formula in line with the WHO Code as this is proven to affect breastfeeding rates. From ABA Facebook page

Full fat milk

It’s no surprise that with the Obesity Pandemic FAT RAMPAGE headlines still dominating any ‘health’ or ‘parenting’ media, there are a lot of (often unfounded) fears and prejudices about fat pregnancies, fat births and fat mothering out there. (Did you know that some doctors even worry about fat vaginas? Neither did I until I read this. Never thought you’d hear the term ‘fat vagina’ used as pseudo-medical jargon? Neither did I. Am I repeating the term ‘fat vagina’ gratuitously at this point? Yes, dear reader, perhaps I am.)

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I was lucky to find an obstetrician who never even weighed me and who never made assumptions about my health status because of my body size: many women don’t have that luxury. It is not unusual for women in regional or outer suburban areas to be refused obstetric treatment at their local hospital on the grounds of fat vagina high BMI, even if it is not their first birth and they have not shown any other indications of elevated risk.

It is also not unusual, once the baby is born, for fat women to receive negative or conflicting advice about breastfeeding.

Not many books will tell you that feeding with large breasts can be a bit tricky, logistically, but it can. And of course, larger women women are more likely to have large breasts. Large breasts don’t always behave: before babies’ necks are able to support the weight of their head, it really helps to have a nipple kept in a pretty steady position, and this is harder when your breasts want to wibble wildly about like nobody’s business. Sometimes women with large breasts have trouble seeing what they are doing with attachment, and that can make it harder to get things right to begin with, especially if they have a baby who has a funny way of holding her lip, like Bean had. Adding to this, the societal pressure to be discreet falls more heavily on women with more flesh to hide, particularly larger areola. Sometimes the omgsexyflesh effect of voluptuous breasts is not a positive experience, like when you’re trying to breastfeed in front of your brother-in-law, for instance. There are also many physiological reasons why a breastfeeding relationship might be a little trickier to establish for a fat mother – fat women are often subjected to more routine interventions during childbirth, some of which can interfere with lactation. Fat women also quite commonly have polycystic ovarian syndrome, or perhaps another hormonal quirk which may impact upon milk production.

As The Well-Rounded Mama highlights in her excellent piece on this topic, there are also psycho-social reasons why breastfeeding may be a little trickier for fat mothers. Reasons that researchers haven’t seemed overly interested in exploring.

I have said here that giving birth to Bean was a huge boost to my body-confidence. (For another take on a similar theme, see first the egg.) For most of my life, my body has been perceived by others – and of course by myself – as more imperfect and defective than useful and productive. My body has, in short, been burdened with an inferiority complex. It’s not just me who feels this way (nor just fat women, but of course fat is my focus in this post.) Is it any wonder that fat mothers, who’ve been led to believe by the media and wider society that their bodies are all wrong, fear that they will also fail to nourish their babies? Is it any wonder that fat mothers, who have probably already been subjected to greater scrutiny of their health and their behaviours and perhaps to a very medicalised pregancy and birth because of the size of their bodies find it difficult, then, to have trust in what their bodies can do? Is it any wonder that fat mothers, living in a culture where the Gisele Bundchens and Angelina Jolies set the bar for maternal aesthetics struggle even more than most to engage in an activity where their body will be exposed, where they may need to lift their shirt and show a flabby, stretch-marked belly in public? Is it any wonder that when it comes to breastfeeding rates, fat women – women who are most susceptible to messages undermining their confidence in normal physiological processes – are falling behind?

If breastfeeding is to take its rightful place at the centre of public health policies, we need to do more than name and shame groups of women who find it harder than others to feed their babies the physiologically normal way. We need researchers and medical professionals to unpack the myriad of reasons for lower breastfeeding rates in fat women and to take effective action. Headlines futilely recommending weight loss, and further stigmatising fat women, do not help. Drumming up panic about how infant formula use promotes obesity without actually supporting women to establish and continue breastfeeding is not helpful. Shame is not helpful. Lactivists and birth activists and sympathetic health professionals must be size accepting, or they do a disservice to a significant percentage of mothers and their families.

Ending fat phobia and misguided health information founded in obesity panic is not just about making it easier for fat adults to eat whatever they like without shame. It’s about making it possible for infants to eat what they need, without anyone feeling ashamed, too.

Sexing the breast

Breasts, or boobs as I quite like to call them, are pretty sexy (to a lot of people). Let’s be frank: I identify as straight but I find them quite appealing in some contexts. I’ve been socialised that way, I suppose: everything is sold to us with cleavage shots. Breasts (or should I say, certain types of breasts) are beyond fetishised. They’re valorised. They’re the heroines of the piece in practically every ad slot. And hey, aside from media bombardment and fashion trends and ‘sex sells’, breasts are quite nice in and of themselves aren’t they? Soft globes of flesh, sensuous, evocative, erogenous. There’s no point denying it.

Breasts are also, of course, for feeding babies. Many of the objections to public breastfeeding or breastfeeding toddlers or, for some people, breastfeeding at all, spring from our cultural obsession with the sexy breast. We are bombarded daily with images of barely-clad breasts in a sexual context and so it is little wonder that for some people, revealing a breast is always something that is sexual, something that should be done in private. It’s no wonder that for some people, the thought of a woman’s nipple being suckled in public by anyone, even if that person is her baby or child, is squeamish-making.

This is a problem. It’s a problem because for breastfeeding rates to improve, public breastfeeding needs to be normalised. Breastfeeding beyond baby-hood needs to be normalised. We need to see more images of breasts performing their role as nurturing, nourishing organs to counteract the plethora of images of breasts as sexually alluring.

That’s why, when Kim Kardashian recently commented negatively on public breastfeeding, many lactivists were outraged. That’s why lactivists (me included) have been pointing out inconsistencies in Facebook’s ‘obscenity’ rules as applied to breastfeeding images and sexualised images. And that’s why a recent baby magazine editorial which called breastfeeding ‘creepy’ has outraged breastfeeding advocates.

All of these things are frustrating, and lactivists are right to take the offenders to task.

But there is a danger here. As I wrote here, I am a multidimensional woman. I am sexual as well as maternal. So is my body. I am not either/or. A breast that feeds a child can also excite a lover. It is also part of a body; part of its owner’s body; part of her sexual response system.

One of my favourite novels is Leaning Towards Infinity by Sue Woolfe. Among other things, it is a feminist examination of the bonds between mothers and daughters and of the ambivalence many mothers feel as they face tensions between their maternal selves and their academic and career aspirations and their sexual expression. Many years before I became a mother myself, I read this book and was fascinated by Woolfe’s descriptions of breastfeeding: the character Hypatia says When my baby sucks, my vagina contracts. It’s like sneaking an orgasm. I had never known, before, that breastfeeding could be arousing for some women: but it makes sense, perfect sense, when you learn that the hormone oxytocin is at work in milk ejection as well as orgasm. Just because we are performing maternity with our bodies doesn’t make them any less our bodies, doesn’t make them any less sexual. Perhaps, when we consider how sex and reproduction entwine and interact in bodily ways, it makes us more so.

My experience of breastfeeding was not like Hypatia’s. I didn’t find it remotely sexy or arousing. I imagine that if I had have, it would be hard to write about it here. People would, quite frankly, find it ‘creepy’ if I did (I may well have found it creepy myself). We are all far more comfortable with a big red line being drawn between maternity and sexuality (hello Madonna/whore complex!) and I’m afraid that many breastfeeding advocates aren’t much different.

We have to move past this. We have to, because a woman doesn’t cease to have a sexual side once she gives birth. Because women (like Kim Kardashian) who present their breasts as sexually alluring don’t deserve to be slut-shamed for playing to cultural expectations. Because some women do find breastfeeding ‘creepy’ – or difficult – and those women mustn’t be silenced. Because if lactivists wish to claim that breastfeeding is normal and natural, it’s laughable for us to also suggest, even unwittingly, that sex and the sensuality of breasts is unnatural and abnormal. Because some women struggle to breastfeed because it triggers memories of sexual abuse or assault, and when we talk about breastfeeding as if a breast is never sexualised we erase those women. Because the ways in which parenting is a sensual experience, the (non-sexual but nevertheless sensual) pleasures of skin-skin contact and intimacy with our children, shouldn’t be minimised or denied, least of all by breastfeeding advocates. And because we’re all individuals here: our relationships with our bodies, our children, our sexuality are complex and multifaceted and changeable. Feminism is about fighting against simplifying those relationships, against reducing them to stereotypes and simple binaries.

It’s also about fighting for bodily autonomy. My breasts, they are mine – not my child’s or my partner’s – they are not either/or, and what I do with them and how I feel about that is personal, individual, and completely up to me.

***

A number of great pieces have been written about these very issues lately. Arwyn at Raising My Boychick posted this excellent piece which, I wish to acknowledge, has informed and inspired my own post. Go read it and the comments too.

PhD in Parenting has an excellent break-down of the problems with that ‘creepy’ editorial.

Her Bad Mother wrote this great piece about the responses to Kim Kardashian’s offending tweet, and the slippery-slope to slut-shaming.

Breastfeeding is a feminist issue

The latest article on Breastfeeding Medicine confirms it: breastfeeding is a feminist issue. Breastfeeding advocacy is a feminist concern (although breastfeeding advocates are quite often not feminists, and feminists are quite often not interested in breastfeeding.)

Lactivism and feminism collide and collude in many ways: workplace rights for women hinge on reproductive rights (and breastfeeding is part of the reproductive process when we consider that it is physiologically normal for a baby to be fed from its mother’s body). The right of women to exist in the public sphere whilst still being able to choose activities that are specifically feminine, that have been traditionally relegated to domestic spaces, is at the heart of lactivism and also feminism. Asserting that our bodies can be functional and do not merely exist as eye candy is feminist, and part of the power of breastfeeding. Resisting commercial messages about the inadequacy of women’s bodies compared with the ‘scientific’ formula produced in a factory is resisting patriarchal messages. Caring for our babies as we see fit, in a sustainable way, in a gentle way, can be a radical act.

But isn’t feminism about choice?

Sure, it is. I fully support the right of all parents to choose how they feed their babies: and that means supporting their right to use commercial baby milk. That means accepting that some parents will always choose never to breastfeed, or to breastfeed for only a short, pre-ordained period. I may not always understand why someone would freely choose not to breastfeed but I will always argue for their right to do so.

The reality, though, is that most parents who don’t choose breastfeeding, or whose babies are weaned from the breast very early, aren’t making a choice without regret. There are a confluence of pressures on new parents. Returning to work is a common one (to be able to breastfeed on demand for more than a few weeks or perhaps months is still usually a marker of economic privilege). Physiological problems (and a lack of support to overcome these) account for a small but significant percentage of early terminations of a breastfeeding relationship. But what we really have, when it comes to breastfeeding rates, is an attitude problem. In Australia the vast majority of mothers attempt to breastfeed in the early weeks. But a lack of acceptance of not only breastfeeding but perhaps the parenting challenges – and delights – which accompany this choice, abounds in our community. If parents and grandparents and friends and even doctors or midwives are conflicted about infant feeding, overcoming common hurdles can seem impossibly hard. And when knowledge is limited and health professionals give conflicting advice, breastfeeding is probably not going to be easy.

Those who claim that mothers who ‘give up’ on breastfeeding just aren’t willing to try are misguided at best, downright nasty at worst. Breastfeeding problems like painfully cracked nipples or recurrent mastitis might be temporary and they might be solvable but for an individual mother they can be excruciating, demoralising, defeating. I know: I too have felt the tug of the deceptively simple ‘solution’ of artificial feeding in the early hours of a pain-filled night. I don’t for one instant underestimate the struggles that women who try, and fail, to exclusively breastfeed. I don’t for one instant assume the bottle they are offering their infant is any less representative of nurturing and love than the breast I offered to mine.

How do lactivists reconcile a commitment to respecting individual choices and accepting that feeding is only one part of a loving mother-infant bond with advocacy for higher breastfeeding rates? To me, the answer is quite obvious. Being critical of the forces which work against mothers to limit their choices is congruent with supporting individual parenting decisions. Better support for breastfeeding mothers: parental leave policies, parenting rooms, well-educated health professionals, a community that accepts and respects the needs of babies, will benefit all parents, not only the lactating kind.

Lactivism isn’t, and should never be, about making non-breastfeeding parents feel guilty. There is nothing to be gained by drawing the ire of women who tried to breastfeed. Rather, we should be encouraging those parents who value breastfeeding whether or not they were able to do it to direct their anger towards the systemic problems that constrained their choices. But first of all, we have to be decent human beings worth listening to. We have to stand up for all parents. We have to support women and their choices. You know, like feminists.

Facebook, bastion of misogyny

Facebook likes to claim that it exists to

Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

In many ways it does this: I’m a regular user. I like sharing pictures of my kid with faraway friends, for one thing. But there are many ways in which Facebook does not make me feel open, or connected. And as for sharing? Well, I’d better not share a photo of me breastfeeding Bean because that would be obscene!

The furore over Facebook’s removal of breastfeeding photos such as these may have abated slightly but there has been no satisfactory resolution. Members of Facebook groups promoting the right to breastfeed publicly and the acceptance of breastfeeding as physiologically normal are still periodically either banned or threatened with banning. Images of breastfeeding posted either on individual’s profiles or group sites are subject to removal.

When I posted about the Facebook breastfeeding ban here and here, the hypocrisy of Facebook’s founders concerned me: here was a site which happily rakes in revenue from targeted ads (dating services seem to be a favourite) which very frequently include sexualised images of women. Logging into my page on any given day, I know I’m likely to be bombarded with a nice bit of boobage spilling out of a tight dress inticing me to click, click, click. Moreover, like Myspace, Facebook hosts many images uploaded by users of themselves or others in sexualised poses. Where these images don’t contain the requisite amount of nudity to be called ‘obscene’ by Facebook, they are left alone.

Now I’m not saying that all pouty-face shots must first pass the censors! But clearly there is a disconnect here: rational adults know that an image can be highly sexualised without including outright nudity and we also should know that breastfeeding is not sexual, even though it very often includes some form of nudity.

April at Eclectic Effervescence wrote this Open Letter to Facebook about the breastfeeding ban

Last week, I posted a picture of myself breastfeeding my newborn twins using my Facebook account. I posted this picture to a pro-breastfeeding fan page, to help encourage other mothers. My picture was one of thousands uploaded to the page. What a beautiful site. All of these experienced breastfeeding women, supporting each other. Helping to say, “breastfeeding is normal!” “Breastfeeding is beautiful!” It really is an amazing page.

But you took that picture down.

And this follow-up piece, complete with images that Facebook apparently don’t think are inappropriately sexual, is well worth your time.

Lately, my ire has increased. It’s not just in the advertising or the typical user-uploaded images that fundamental hypocrisy is laid bare. Facebook is home to innumerable ‘groups’ and ’cause’ pages which violate every element of basic decency, taste, and fairness. In short: they are obscene.

For Exhibit A, I present:

The recent Facebook page set up by male university students attending St Paul’s College in Sydney and dedicated to the benefits of raping women and vitiating both the moral and legal concept of ‘consent’ is an example, albeit extreme, of maintained attitudes regarding women, sex and sexual violence.

This piece by Caroline Taylor on last year’s controversy over a page set up to promote rape rightly suggests that the culture in which a page like this was allowed to flourish for months unchallenged – that is, the culture of Facebook and also of Australia – is not respectful of girls and women. It is a rape culture.

It’s also a violent culture. Facebook provided the perfect outlet for those bored with playing Grand Theft Auto: Killing Your Hooker So You Don’t Have To Pay Her.

More recently, Melinda Tankard Reist has written about a group dedicated to slut-shaming.The site has since been removed, but only after numerous reports were made about its title, content, images and commentary – including around twenty from me on separate counts of extreme hate speech. Some of the images were of girls as young as ten.  One of them was a woman with a battered face: comments included ‘her husband had to tell her twice LOL’ and other statements that do not bear repeating. Melinda Tankard Reist writes:

Some images are clearly posted for revenge. Often full names are used. What means do these women and girls have to defend themselves? How do they deal with it? What does it mean for them in their daily lives at school or work or at home or anywhere, to be identified to the whole world as a slut?

By allowing this site, Facebook is a conduit for bullying, harassment and abuse.

After a campaign of reporting, the group was removed: but not hastily. And at what cost to the girls and women shamed, was that delay? Anecdotally, I’ve heard a breastfeeding photo can last less than a few hours on Facebook if it is prominently posted. The apologists who keep telling me that Facebook can’t possibly moderate its content any faster may need to try again with a better argument. As Danielle Miller writes, this type of cyber bullying can be devastating for those directly targeted, but it can also be triggering and disturbing for the rest of us. These shrines to hate speech and denigration only serve as constant reminders that women (or any other targeted group) are less than. And open to vicious attack.

Arguments that Facebook’s user-generated content is simply reflective of the broader community and should therefore be left alone don’t sit well with me. Facebook and other social media is not real life: it can feel consequence-free, and it can channel outpourings of goodwill — or hate — in ways which seem to gather their own momentum. It is also becoming an ‘essential’ part of the lives of most teenagers and adults – even young children — so its reach is huge. It markets itself as safe — certainly, the reputation it has with parents seems to be more favourable than that of MySpace, and the rhetoric used to justify the banning of breastfeeding photos suggests that the company cares about young users and ‘keeping things clean’. And yet, because they rely on user moderation and clearly don’t pay enough staff to deal promptly with user reports, they can unwittingly host extremely offensive and also illegal content.

Australian online newspaper The Punch took them to task over this, prompted by the hijacking of two pages dedicated to memorialising young children:

Tribute pages to two children who died in tragic circumstances this month – Elliott Fletcher and 8-year-old Trinity Bates – were used to post obscene messages and pornographic content. The incident has sparked a heated debate over the extent to which Facebook monitors the content people distribute on the network.

Apparently the depravity of some people knows no bounds, and far be it from the moderators to stifle their ‘fun’ too swiftly.

After reading about this, I had a little look around some group pages set up to raise awareness and/or funds to fight the proliferation of images of child sexual abuse. I won’t link to what I found. But suffice to say there are two kinds of people who frequent those pages who are most certainly not welcome: those who think that it’s entertaining to make jokes about raping children in order to get a rise out of people, and those who post links (or hints of where to find links) to objectionable material. I even stumbled across some Facebook profiles of people using aliases which double as euphemisms for paedophilia, one of whom listed as his employer ‘child porn’. And included a link to a website in Asia. The only place I clicked was the Report button but I still felt like I needed a shower afterwards.

So is the answer just to log off? (Unfair to lose this platform to share photos and updates with friends!)  Shout loudly until somebody starts to listen and content is more sensitively moderated and reports more acted upon more quickly? (Perhaps – although this is difficult, demoralising work to do without significant support.) Set up counter groups about diversity and respect, consent and empowerment and then police them vigilantly for trolls? (This is already being done – are enough people paying attention?) Accept that douchebaggery is inevitable? (Isn’t that depressing and defeatist?) Just look at some pictures of kittens and think happy thoughts? (Maybe.)

What’s your best answer? Because I honestly don’t know mine.

Also guest-posted at www.melindatankardreist.com.au

It’s all good, so long as you don’t wave it in their faces

A friend sent me an article about some research conducted at her Uni into Australian attitudes to breastfeeding:

Australians need better education about breastfeeding from a young age to prevent mothers feeling they have to stay at home if they have a baby who needs breastfeeding, according to RMIT University lecturer Dr Jennifer James.

Dr James is RMIT University Lecturer in Midwifery and Breastfeeding and Human Lactation and Vice-President of the Australian Lactation Consultants’ Association, which commissioned a Newspoll survey that showed more than one in four Australians viewed breastfeeding in public as unacceptable.

The research also found adults aged 18 to 24 were least supportive, with up to 36 per cent considering breastfeeding in a cafe or at work as unacceptable.

Just 29 per cent of the 1,000 males and females surveyed strongly agreed that women should be encouraged to breastfeed publicly, yet 65 per cent of people believed breastfed babies had a better chance of surviving their first 12 months, Dr James said. Read full article here

I have to say, I’m not surprised. In Australia almost all new mothers initiate breastfeeding (some surely because hospitals encourage it but most because they know it is best for their baby – that message is getting through.) The vast majority who start, though, don’t keep it up. I felt like a failure when Little Bean weaned at 11 months but the fact is that we kept at it longer than around 90 percent of my peers, even though health recommendations are to maintain breastfeeding for no less than 12 months. The reasons for this lack of ‘extended’ (read: physiologically normal) breastfeeding are many but certainly one major one is public perception.

If women feel they must breastfeed only in private, it gets very restrictive pretty damn quick. When a baby wants to feed every couple of hours, there really isn’t much you can do but stay home if feeding around other people is not an option.

And no wonder so many mothers have fears about how they will be perceived – it’s not all just modesty or body image concerns that stop us from exposing our breasts to feed. There is a very real threat of open hostility from strangers, cafe owners, employers, even friends and family members. And this just multiplies as the baby grows older. Many formerly open breastfeeders become closeted as their baby becomes a toddler.

None of this is news.

But what strikes me as most depressing about this particular research is the disconnect between what people know about the benefits of breastmilk – and therefore what they expect mothers to provide – and what they are willing to accept in order for babies to receive that benefit. To say that breastmilk is best for babies and that breastfeeding has other benefits (such as bonding) but to claim that a mother feeding her baby in front of you is ‘unacceptable’ is, frankly, ridiculous.

These attitudes judge and condemn mothers who do not or cannot breastfeed (many of whom probably make the decision not to because their employer/family/the public will not support them to feed when and where they need to.) Yet at the same time, mothers virtuous enough to breastfeed their children are expected to stay in the domestic realm, to restrict their social and work activities, to attend to the needs of their baby but only in such a way as it doesn’t intrude upon anyone else’s delicate sensibilities. Because mothers, you know, are all about catering for the needs of everyone but themselves.

Breastfeeding in a cafe, or a church, shouldn’t be a political act. But it damn well is. Because it brings maternity into open space, it blurs the boundaries between domestic and public, it asserts the physiological function of breasts beyond their sexual role, it normalises the physical connection between parent and child as one which leaves no place for modesty or sterility.

And all this in a country where we have the legal right to breastfeed in public.

Feminist mothers

It’s a curious fact that many women find motherhood is one experience which galvanises their feminist spirit. Whilst completing what might seem to be decidedly non-feminist actions in their daily lives, a lot of mothers are thinking. A lot.

Women my age were raised by parents who wanted us to have education and paid work. We were told by mathematics and science teachers that girls could do these subjects too – as if it weren’t to be taken for granted. And some of us, arriving at university, were bewildered by the prescence of fixtures such as The Women’s Room on campus, or the vociferous Womyn appearing at student rallies. Some couldn’t understand how these things were relevant to us.

And so if young women have managed to avoid, ignore or transcend sexism in education and the workplace and in their relationships with men, the realities of motherhood can come as a pretty rude shock. I’ve seen a woman boldly search for employment while pregnant and be slowly beaten down by it until she had no choice but to acknowledge that her opportunities are restricted by her biology. I know women who have cried themselves to sleep at night because working the hours required to keep up with male counterparts has meant missing one too many school concerts. I know women who have believed their workplaces to be breastfeeding friendly only to discover that the place provided to express milk is the toilet. I have had many, many conversations with friends about how finances and social expectations and biological imperatives and even sometimes vestigial patriarchal leanings have turned us into stay-at-home mothers when we never actually set out to be this. How, a friend once exclaimed, did we become housewives?

Now insofar as I am able to freely choose, I have chosen my lot. So I’m not just having a whinge here.

But I have been thinking about how becoming a mother has brought into sharp relief what I think I have known all along: we cannot move forward without acknowledging that we are bodies as much as we are minds. We need to take our biology into account. And in order to be able to do so without suffering unfairly because of it, our social structures need to change. Babies need to be breastfed: women need time off work to do this well. And yet career trajectories are meant to be linear. They reflect male bodies. This is worse than anachronistic because it robs women and men of choice and it is to the detriment of families and children and also, to be frank, employers themselves. Workplaces lose when women choose to stay home indefinitely.

I’ve not attempted to juggle paid work with parenting, yet. But I can’t imagine I’ll be overwhelmed by a proudly mollified sense of justice when I do return – at least, not until employers expect fathers to take as many sick days as mothers do to care for ill children, for starters.

Renewed feminist vigour at this life stage is not just anger at not being able to ‘have it all,’ as those who fear feminism would have us believe. Actually, it’s coming in contact with the body-hating language of obstetrics and wanting to fight for more woman-centred birth choices. It’s having salespeople ring during the day and ask when your husband will be home because they assume that you can’t make financial decisions. It’s the judgements complete strangers make about the rightness or wrongness of using childcare (or not). It’s hearing friends and strangers praise your husband for ‘babysitting’ but look expectantly at you if your child makes an inconvenient noise. And for me, a lot of it is about breastfeeding.

Rachel Blair says it pretty well in her book ‘Breastfeeders Anonymous’: Breastfeeding feminists…fight to achieve changes that allow women to maintain individuality and pursue careers while still successfully breastfeeding. They recognise that ‘mum-work’ is real work. They battle for a woman’s right to breastfeed herchild wherever, whenever and for however long both mother and child desire. They acknowledge that breastfeeding is a way for females to reclaim their bodies from the patriarchal arena that often exploits breasts and women as merely sexual objects. Breastfeeding is also a way to stand up against the commercialisation that tries to brainwash women into believing that a substitute is better than the milk their own bodies specially manufactures.

Minding their language for them

I’ve become one of those odd people who actually bother to email television breakfast programmes to complain. I’ve done it a couple of times when they’ve said ignorant things about breastfeeding on one of those nastily glossy commercial shows. And been ignored, obviously.

This morning I did it again. This time it was ABC News Breakfast on ABC2 – a show I normally enjoy. Today they have been reporting the sad death of an ACT firefighter who was helping with the Victorian fire effort as the ‘first death of a firefighter in the Victorian bushfire disaster.’

Now I don’t know about the average person, but to me, calling something ‘the first’ automatically implies that there will be more. Not a happy implication. The kind of implication that gives me nightmares, actually. So I sent them a text message (I know, I used to wonder who the hell would use the number in the banner for text messages too!)

Please stop saying first firefighter. Having a husband and friends in the CFA I’d really prefer to hear ‘only’.

And in their next bulletin, they’d changed the words. Joe O’Brien even seemed to place the emphasis on only.

Don’t bother to tell me that there were probably hundreds of people who wrote in and no doubt the camera person and the makeup team said something as well. I just want to feel special, okay?

More famous breasts

 

Salma Hayek is astonishingly beautiful. She’s also astonishing. Despite the backlash she received from some quarters for her comment that she was ‘addicted to breastfeeding’, she’s still talking openly and joyously about it. And I love that. I love it not just because she’s a celebrity and thus some kind of automatic ‘role model’ but because she is so damn sensual, and those bosoms of hers are no doubt the subject of many a sexual fantasy. Having a high-profile woman like her openly talking about lactating whilst publicly displaying her off-the-charts alluring cleavage can only help to work against the notion that breasts are purely sexual (or, in fact, purely maternal).

And now she’s gone one step further from proclaiming her own love of her breastfeeding relationship: she’s talking lactivism on an international scale. And she’s alluding to it as a feminist issue – a matter of women supporting each other for the benefit of all, even and especially if that means putting the needs of their children and themselves before the wants of their husbands. Now that’s what I call hot.

SALMA HAYEK is so fond of breastfeeding she suckled the starving child of a woman who couldn’t express milk during a recent trip to Sierra Leone. The actress, who told the Huffington Post website last year (08) she was so hooked on breastfeeding her baby daughter Valentina, she felt “like an alcoholic”, has revealed she helped a desperate mum in a refugee camp during a UNICEF fact-finding trip.
Appearing on Thursday’s (05Feb09) Today show in America, Hayek simply nodded as host Kathie Lee Gifford asked, “You found a child that was starving to death, the mother had no milk – and you nursed that baby?” And then said, “It’s about women sticking together and we really need to help the children in any way we can.” 
And now the Mexican movie star and UNICEF activist is fighting to promote breastfeeding in Africa – because it helps boost the immune systems of at-risk babies.
Hayek explains, “It is the best thing you can do for your child, not only the bonding, that’s how you build the immune system, so in a country like Africa imagine how important it is for the mothers to do that.
“But there is the belief that if you are breastfeeding you cannot have a sexual life, so the husbands of these women are really encouraging them to stop and this is just a taboo.” (From Contact Music)