Tagged with femininity …

Mar 23 2011
culture, family, feminism

breastfeeding: not just ladybusiness

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mamiscl/4968830387/This piece is featured in Squat! Birth Journal‘s Spring Issue. I encourage an exploration and/or support of this lovely zine (available in paper or digital form); certainly a great gift for an expecting family-to-be! It’s a wonderful publication.

Over my twitterstream my friend Wendy links to a piece of, once again, sex discrimination against a woman feeding her child1). We’ve all heard it before. A woman is feeding her baby in a shop or a library or wherever, when an employee approaches and tells the woman she must leave, often invoking (their fallacious understanding of) the law and – at least in North America – usually in violation of protected rights. And certainly counter to common sense, compassion, and an understanding of public health.

It’s too bad more people don’t seem to see it that way.

Breastfeeding discussion is continually ignored and/or marginalized by the mainstream, made into a fringe issue although it concerns us all – our progress toward an egalitarian society, our support of families, our stewardship of the environment, and our county’s medical costs and spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being. Even movements self-identified as pro-woman often pick and choose which reproductive rights they support and advocate for, ignoring the societal edifices concerning birth, babies, and fulltime care of children – which necessarily ignores the women involved. If you Google “breastfeeding and feminism” you will see communities concerning the former subject discussing the latter, but rarely the reciprocal; mainstream pro-feminist discussions in general do not concern themselves with breastfeeding even though something like eighty percent of USian women do become parents at some point.

Keeping breastfeeding peripheral to social justice discussion contributes to extremely low breastfeeding rates in the so-called developed world (which are lower still in marginalized groups such as black mothers, teen mothers, and native or indigenous mothers, etc.). After all, anyone remedially-versed in the experiences of infant care and feeding understand that support, or lack thereof, is a major if not the major factor in aggregate breastfeeding success rates.

While some without children, or some with older children, or some men believe they can continue to ignore the health and well-being implications of poor breastfeeding rates and the compounded lack of choice afforded to already-stressed marginalized populations, such a luxury is not experienced for the child nor the child’s carer. These peoples’ daily realities are put under additional stressors. Thus when an individual receives repeated shaming messages or policing language and repressive strategies against her, she is most likely to experience discouragement, uncertainty, and isolation; she is at a very real disadvantage. Or as the author of “A tired hungry baby” writes:

I knew the law. I knew my rights. But I was still upset. And not the angry, self-important, righteous kind of upset. The teary, scared, “they”‘re going to kick me out of the store”, “I”‘m here with my kids” type of upset. It was clear I was about to be thrown out, and I was pretty sure that if I was going to be forced to justify feeding my baby, I was going to cry. And I felt truly alone.

This experience and this sentiment could have been written by so many of my friends – and many of these are “educated” women with class, hetero-, cis-, and racial privilege. Which puts the question: at what point does our mainstream dithering about “public decency” get real, and admit the costs we are requiring so many others to pay? “Gross, I shouldn’t have to see that!” seems incredibly trite and inhumane when considering our socioeconomically-classist culture, to put it frankly, requires black, brown, poor and working-class mamas and families pay multifaceted costs – and by heaping on body-shaming and gender-policing we’re just making it harder. “Gross, I shouldn’t have to see that!” tweeted by a white Portland hipster without children is such a disheartening and ignorant response when I consider, for instance, the lived reality of a child up all night screaming from a painful ear infection (and the work/sleep missed by carers and the stress for all involved). To get a little 101, ear infections, which account for thirty million trips to the doctor each year and are experienced by an estimated 75% of babies, is a risk decimated by a factor of at least two for a breastfed child2. And that’s just one real-life health issue and one potential pragmatism for parents, and it makes me irritated enough to knock that Stumptown out of said urbanite’s hand.

“Gross, I shouldn’t have to see that!” hurts real-life families, real-life people.

“Gross, I shouldn’t have to see that!” is something that should have been eliminated from our public discourse a long, long time ago.

This is why it is key that those who are not at this moment stuffing a nipple into a baby’s face – including men, including formula-feeders, and including those without children – support breastfeeding and stand up for families’ rights and for mothers to young children. When the mainstream frames breastfeeding an issue that the individual mothers should be fighting, all on their own, it throws the game (especially considering the corporate power and cultural reach held by formula producers: phdinparenting.com has some great information on this). Concomitantly, framing infant feeding as solely individualistic and “choice”-based is also at heart of those who shame individual formula feeding families (moms) for “not trying/caring hard enough”, too (sadly, there are many of these voices, although for the purposes of this piece I should note bottle feeding mothers are generally not asked to leave public spaces based only on their method of feeding).

So while there are many breastfeeding mothers who stand up to pressure and have a generally positive feeding career, the vast majority of breastfeeding mothers have been pressured to stop feeding and most have been shamed explicitly or implicitly while others stand silently by or dismiss the topic as a “women’s issue” (because, you know, those aren’t important).

This means often, as in the above-cited author’s case, at the point an episode of discrimination is most acute and immediate, she is likely extremely disadvantaged in her response. Consider also that mothers who breastfeed:

* are expending 300 – 500 extra calories a day per breastfeeding child (yes, some women are breastfeeding more than one child), and those are just the calories required to produce milk, not those needed to care for, comfort and nurture, clean for, etc. anyone else in the family.

* are often severely sleep-deprived (personally, I cannot overstate this effect on my life when I had infants).

* are usually dealing with hormonal and physical changes while they:

* are also under endemic body-policing and -shaming pressures including scrutiny of their weight, the state of their skin or hair, and their changed or changing body shape.

* are often under cultural policing as well; this is levied at mothers of color, those without class privilege, those outside the heteronormative spectrum, those with multiple children, etc.

* are usually constantly segregated and policed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by virtue of having children, by our adultist and child-unfriendly cultural norms.

* are often under-supported by their family, friends, neighbors – and, too-often, their partners (even well-intentioned ones), if they have one.

* are in the throes of what many would identify as one of the most life-changing experiences they’ve had - the twentyfour-seven care and responsibility for another human being, and an incredibly vulnerable one at that.

It is my position that any restriction of breastfeeding should be taken as sex discrimination - whether legally promoted or de facto by policy, societal attitudes, etc. As such, I haven’t yet heard a compelling argument to support it. A disdain for a function of women’s bodies doesn’t seem meritorious enough to warrant prescriptive measures.

It’s time for others to adopt that standard as well.

Because in North America, fighting for the unrecognized humanity of these women, babies, and families, often seems a never-ending job against a seemingly bottomless pit of ignorance and oppression. Today, as I finish this piece, a blogreader sends me an article from The Root, in which a woman nursing in the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. was hounded twice by security and told she must enter the bathroom and sit on the toilet to feed her child3.

So, yeah. “Gross, I shouldn’t have to see that!” needs to go.

* Photo credit: 3º Lugar – 2º Concurso Fotogra¡fico Regional “Fotografiando la Lactancia”. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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Mar 12 2010
film revue

Film Feministe: Dick Flicks Edition (Part One)

fisticuffs & pipe-smoking

Holmes and Watson in a spat?

Like all reviews in The Film Feministe, I strive to reveal a brief synopses of a film as well as an analysis. Occasionally my reviews include minor plot spoilers; caveat emptor.

I love Westerns. I love action films. One of the reasons I seek these out and watch them is because more than just about any other type of film I enjoy a well-done “buddy picture”. These seem exceedingly rare; look at your average Hollywood film marketed as a “buddy picture” and you have a couple of (usually white) men punching and shooting because they “have” to or they should; a handful of women serve as either serious love-interest or titillating arm-candy and ogling fodder. Few “buddy pictures” really develop on the nature, integrity, and character of the men therein, although that is supposedly what the film is about. In subsequent editions of this column I’d like to talk a bit about when buddy pictures get it right; here we have an example of one that got it almost completely wrong – despite having some wonderful material to start with.

Without further ado… I give you Film Feministe’s Dick Flick Edition (Part One)!

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

One of my early cinematic memories of a life lived loving movies was my mother telling me of a Sherlock Holmes film rendition in which “Watson and Holmes were homosexuals” (The way my mom says “homosexual” sets my teeth on edge).  My mother identified the gay Holmes film as 1988′s spoof Without a Clue starring Michael Caine and Sir Ben Kingsley.  A cursory review of this older film does not reveal there is any romantic plot or subplot between the two men; knowing my mother, she probably got her facts wrong.

I loved the Sherlock Holmes fiction stories and have read them forward and backwards yearly since the age of ten.  A few months ago when I saw the trailer for the newest Guy Ritchie installation I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  Upon first glance the film looked to have stripped away the character of Holmes and the appeal of his stories, supplanting these with explosions, fisticuffs, high-gloss, slickness, and – incredibly – sexual titillation (sex in the fiction series? Zero).  But, as a Holmes-lover, I couldn’t stay away. 

Even with my modest expectations I was surprised how much it got things wrong. In fact, the film got so much wrong it is much easier to pinpoint what it (almost) got right: namely, the bond between Watson and Holmes.  For me it has never mattered much whether there was a romantic or sexual relationship between the two men; this interpretation or a strictly platonic one could serve the stories equally well. An exemplary aspect of the Sherlock Holmes installations were less his so-called “clever” deductions (many of which were impossible for a reader to have predicted or participated in, given they often revolved around implausible and last-minute-delivered minutiae from Holmes’ physical or mental library) than rather the relationship between the two crime-solvers. Holmes and Watson loved one another.  Deeply, loyally, and certainly to the exclusion of actual details in case-solving when such a choice had to be made.  I have always been drawn to stories of deep friendship and fidelity despite adversity – whether between men or women, and including or excluding a sexual element.  Holmes and Watson continue to deeply satisfy me as a reader, even when the stories and mysteries, make no mistake, are often rather silly and contrived.

To say Guy Ritchie’s latest imagining of Holmes was capable of hinting at a sexual relationship between the two men would be understatement. There are so very many visual and verbal clues as to this being the case it would be exhaustive to list them.  Much of the double entrendre is delivered in aggressive, playful fashion by Holmes (played by Robert Downey Jr.) to Watson (played by Jude Law).  The plot and subplot are essentially skeletal framework on which the larger story of the two mens’ relationship plays out: there is a mystery, of course, involving violent, conspiratory elements to fill the run time of the film (Holmes’ mysteries were often only a few pages). The film’s theme, however, is the impending breakup of the active partnership between the two men. Watson is getting married to Mary Morstan and will soon be moving out of the Baker Street residence. Holmes seeks to disrupt the engagement and the move-out date in every way possible.

Watson is a more active participant in the film than he was in the books. When he’s not assisting Holmes on the shockingly dangerous and physically violent errands of mystery-solving (more on this a bit) he spends much of the screentime asserting his agency to leave his obsessively needy companion.  Their bickering is partly old-roommate, partly sexual. In a early moment of the film the two are arguing about Watson’s imminent departure and Holmes lifts a long cane up to his friend’s mouth. “Get that thing out of my face,” Watson snaps at his housemate. “It’s not in my face, it’s in my hand,” Holmes mildly teases back. “Get the thing that’s in your hand out of my face,” Watson snarls in return.  The film is filled with many such in-jokes and allusions although a clueless person might not see them (or wish not to see them – hello, repressed straight males, oddly enough a target audience for the punch-em-up nature of the film).

Any sexual guesswork as to this version of the Holmes / Watson relationship is irrelevant in analyzing other choices the film makes, most of them familiar and namely, a most Drake McManslab series of plot events.  There are a myriad of explosions, poison gases, the destruction of massive amounts of property (really.  lots), electronic torture devices, freakishly brutal henchmen, and perhaps least appealing and most boring of all, endless, slow-then-rapid-motion fight scenes, some of them half-naked (Robert Downey Jr. has a rockin’ bod), many with deadly, terrible weapons.  The fight scenes might go almost unnoticed to audiences used to the simultaneous pornographic exploitation and trivialization of violence – and that’s the point. The film, instead of taking us somewhere imaginative, truly sinister, or realistically scary, merely employs chains, cattle-prods, axes, bullets, and numerous other forms of brutality in semi-comedic treatment that – if witnessed in real life – would have real-life and horrific repercussions (okay, yes, I am aware this is a Guy Ritchie film).

The violence is used often but only halfheartedly informs us of Holmes character.  He is a macho, macho man, sporting fighting-weight abs and vicious fighting skills.  He punishes himself masochistically in the boxing ring and is too emotionally remote and physically tough to notice damage inflicted on his person (curiously, this film version has Holmes drinking alcohol and just about any other stimulating and illegal substance; no mention of cocaine, which in the books was his only chemical dependency).  OK, yes, we get it.  Tough, tough guy.  Anyone read these books?  The literary Holmes was tough, but not Big McLargeHuge-tough – he was not given to sport but an able boxer and a man of tremendous physical strength (that he rarely deigned necessary to employ), by terms lazy and driven, prone to cocaine and tobacco but no other vice – and yes, not even “fast women”, of which the film also takes liberty to add:

Because further progressing a tired hyper-masculinied meme, there are no women in the film.  Indeed all females – including grisly murder victims and the two romantic (yet largely ornamental) leads – are referred to as “girls” (hint: you might realize you are watching a tired-ass sexist film if the female characters are never referred to by name, or as “women”, but rather – girls, or in the case of Mamet, broads.  Seriously.  Pay attention next time).  Mary Morstan (played by Kelly Reilly) shows up so infrequently we’re not sure at all why Watson is marrying her.  Her performance embodies the traits of high-class demeanor yet accessibly sexual – and even though she is supposed to be the love of Watson’s life, she is conveniently absent from screen time (in the books she was instrumental in “The Sign of Four”, one of the more epic Holmes stories).  Irene Adler is even further altered from the character in the book to ill effect, turned from a woman of the world to a cute li’l thing in the casting of Rachel McAdams.  Adler is no longer the intelligent, dignified, and wronged woman-cum-blackmailer of the book (who did not have any physical relationship with Holmes, I seek to ad) but instead one of those Sexy Ninja-Thief Ladies we’ve been enduring with regularity since the Charlie’s Angels revival of the eerily nineties.  She lacks the human traits and character foibles her male co-stars get in spades; her main traits seem to be that of being besotted with Holmes, a whiff of standard duplicitous femme fatale, and being very, very pretty.  Did I mention she’s pretty? Gosh-darn, she really is.

The cast is good, but underused. The talents of Mark Strong, like McAdams, are wasted in the role of Lord Blackwood, a creepy Satanist-or-is-he? of standard fare.  I was surprised and pleased by the role, casting, and character of Lestrade (Briton Eddie Marsan), a minor but familiar customer in the Holmes canon.  Costumes, location, and historical backdrop were used to the effect you’d expect from a big-budget film; namely, with much flare and little depth.  The costumes, naturally, made me drool, but then, I am a sewist.

In conclusion, I could have forgived the glossiness or even the punch, punch, punch, slap, smack – if only we’d had a compelling storyline between the two men, whose friendship is a legendary one.  The last bit of film reveals a character and subplot that will make it near impossible for me, or any other Holmes fanatic, to stay away from the sequel; I’m hoping if the institution is not handed off to a less uber-masculine director we at least slow down.  Less slow-motion super-punches, more of the deep draught of a wonderful friendship between two thrillingly well-rendered characters.

Never judge a book by its movie.
-J.W. Eagan

Mentioned:

Without a Clue (1988)

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

03/14/2010 ETA: Holmes and I, a blog post

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