Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

a relatively irony-naive thing to do

haha!

I thought this was an interesting discussion of the word "mansplain," if maybe a little (justifiably) pedantic: http://www.xojane.com/issues/why-you-ll-never-hear-me-use-term-mansplain

yeah, good read

http://therumpus.net/2012/08/explicit-violence/ <--read this, thread

this might be my favorite thread right now

*nods*

Shulamith Firestone, author of 'The Dialectic Of Sex' passes away.

So sad.

dialectic of sex throws some weird curveballs in the direction of race/sex intersectionality and her work definitely necessitates a cohambee river collective response, but its a pretty shocking achievement for a 25 year old painting student. i really want to see this btw: http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/shulie

I was looking for the RIP thread to post the same link. I only know her through a history of feminism I read a few years back, but remembered the name. What I found so sad was the juxtaposition of that photo right next to the details of her death.

the Rumpus piece is really something.

RIP Shulamith Firestone, you were a fucking wonder.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/09/10/natural_parenting_the_same_old_sexism_dressed_up_in_fancy_new_clothes_.html

what say you?

Breast-feeding is good for babies, but it's becoming clear that its become such a big deal because it goes back to the long-standing belief in their own moral superiority held by the upper middle class.

I've seen Slate do this little rhetorical trick on a host of different issues. Why can't it be that breast-feeding is good for babies and unfortunately not everyone has the opportunity or ability to do it? Instead if it's a choice not available to everyone, that means that those who do breast-feed are obviously just being morally superior.

that blog post seems to take place in an entire universe constructed of straw

Well it's a pretty easy BS argument to make (often on Ilx!) that the reason other people make certain decisions (diet, child rearing, moral choices, music) is bc of some desire to merely appear superior or conversely some kind of moral fAiling. Sometimes that may be true but mostly it's just a way to argue contemptuously without engaging the ideas. Realize this isnt specific to this topic of course.

It's also a blogging strategy -- find a phenomenon and point out the hidden rot underlying it

This is why studies on the effects of breast-feeding can't meaningfully separate long-term breast-feeding from the benefits of being born with class privilege

I mean, really? Link? Maybe that's true, but studies do exactly that sort of separation all the time.

really sorry to hear about shulamith firestone -- 'dialectic' blew my mind back in 2001. her second book 'airless spaces' is also well worth a read.

has anyone seen the original version of that documentary?

I seriously rarely meet any of these storied parents who either kill themselves trying to follow every detail of a trendy parenting school or "backlash" against the parenting trend. Raising a baby irl is just too goddamned hard to do anything other than settling on the compromises that work for you.

I think this is otm and these kinds of articles often sound to me like the author is railing against their own superego and not against an actual other human being.

there are examples of the push to breastfeed having irl economic consequences in the UK i think. i believe that the milk vouchers or reduced cost baby milk which used to be available to low income parents has been taken away in case it "promotes" bottle feeding when the reality is mostly that a section of mothers who weren't going to breastfeed anyway are having to spend more of the family budget on bottle milk. there are other examples that i can't bring to mind but most policies that aim to push people into doing "the right thing" seem naive, at best

That said, I am curious if H agrees with me about the article, as she's the one actually staying home, breastfeeding, making purees from scratch, etc.

studies do exactly that sort of separation all the time.

― look at this quarterstaff (Hurting 2), Wednesday, September 12, 2012 1:16 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don't know anything about the studies in question, but i am familiar with studies per se, and while they do do (poop joke) that kind of separation all the time, it's not always meaningful (ie - bias can sometimes be inescapable). funnily enough (for this thread), a good example of this would be a recent study in the NEJM that observed that, even if you control for a lot of things like staging and age and whatnot, radical prostatectomy has no significant effect on mortality when compared to observation/non-intervention.

so a study that investigated breast-feeding and outcomes could conclude that, by and large, those that breast-fed had better outcomes (no clue what those outcomes were in this case) than those that didn't. but also that those that breast-fed were also demographically distinct from those that didn't, and that if you compare "being upper middle class" and "breast-feeding," the difference in outcomes is less compelling.

now y'all are probably right (hurting otm about irl baby rearing, i assume (IANAP)), and maybe the author is throwing straw all over the place, but i think there is some value in pointing out that maybe just MAYBE a lot of the benefits seemingly derived from so-called 'natural parenting' (which i'll grant was pretty vaguely defined) are as much to do with the general ~situation~ of the child benefiting. and, moreover, at least for the author, that it's worth noticing that 'natural parenting' just serves to shore up not-so-feminist ideas about motherhood, maternity, etc.

namely, that there is a biologically correct way to rear an infant that looks (in extremis, in strawman form) a whole lot like the traditional gender roles of oh say 200 years ago, and that buying into that completely -- which may never actually happen -- is something to, at the very least, be leery of.

xp interesting, NV, but not that surprising.

afaik the benefits of breast-feeding are very very well documented?

wasn't really contending that, tbh

nah i wdn't deny the benefits of breast-feeding but i think it's fair to say that the benefits may be exaggerated against other factors in child welfare and that state interventions to promote breast-feeding may have ill thought through socioeconomic effects/biases

yeah fwiw I was just saying on the Bloomberg thread that Mayor Bloomberg should gtfo boobs. Too sensitive and personal an issue to have a state-sponsored campaign on.

but wrt breastfeeding and class privilege -- I'd imagine this is a field where it's actually NOT that hard to separate out class, since breastfeeding is NOT SOMETHING EXCLUSIVELY OR PRIMARILY PRACTICED BY THE RICH.

I mean it's not like even in America we've undergone this 180 flip where now all privileged people breastfeed and all underprivileged people use formula.

xp

more that: when we're talking about medical studies, sometimes "the benefits" of something can be shown to be statistically significant ("yup, it's clear that breast-feeding is better than not"), while not being actually, clinically significant. to wit -- it could be demonstrated that "those that received drug A (MILK) when compared to those that did not were found to have less oh we'll say hospitalizations over some span of time," and it could be statistically significant, no bones about it, they did go to the hospital less. but then you could also say "5/2376 of drug A patients were hospitalized over the course of 5 years, in comparison to 12/2319 placebo patients." there could be some very strong correlative effect, but, like, who cares about seven people, just make sure the kid wears her seatbelt

nb i am strawmanning an article that may not even exist, but w/e

xxp my very, very anecdotal evidence suggests that lower-income moms do actually breast-feed less; that is, the women that wanted to know when they could get back to work the soonest (because they really had to get back to work, if anyone was going to be eating anything) tended to be women that were also planning on weaning as soon as possible (it's nothing i've ever had to deal with, but i imagine pumping at work is pain in the butt).

Of course it's neither extreme but I suspect that the numbers resemble that flip more than you think. I don't know what your experience was in the hosp, but formula used to be pushed hard in hospitals, with companies providing free formula and a lot of literature and gift items to new moms under the aegis of the hospital itself, which makes it seem medically recommended. Poor/undereducated/underprivileged moms are going to be more susceptible to that message; also they're less likely to be eligible for maternity leave from their crappy, part-time jobs, so being able to stay home near the baby to bf is an enormous logistical problem.

xp!

pumping at work is tough (speaking for my wife) not even because of the time it takes but because at a certain point you have to put everything aside and head to a pumping room (if your company is forward thinking enough to have one) or your office (if you have one), otherwise you'll end up in a bathroom or borrowing an office or finding a closet.

haven't we already 'done' instances of shunning and disapproval of women who bottle-feed? or was that somewhere else.

If your job is in retail or customer service or blue-collar factory/assembly/warehouse/labor stuff, you probably can't get the time to pump at all, much less a dedicated space.

hah - they just put up a wall between me and my pump[ing co worker - win for me as she is loud

I'm aware of all this. But we also have an entire world of other countries from which to cull data, and also it's not like the number of breastfeeding poor mothers in the US is so statistically insignificant that we can't even get a reasonable sample.

it's so weird to be having a conversation about shunning ppl who bottle feed bc when i was growing up the big stigma was about women who breastfed in public, and until fairly recently the vast majority of americans bottle fed exclusively. it's a huge victory for le leche league that breastfeeding has become normalized at all, let alone something that [okay, notably contrarian website] slate would see as culturally tyrannical

tyrannical only in certain contexts

i just mean to say that it represents a huge cultural shift

the big stigma was about women who breastfed in public

spitballin here but i think at least some of the stigma was not boob-related, and more a "why aren't you at home right now" type situation

what has become recently normalized isn't breast-feeding itself (if anything, not-breast-feeding is a pretty recent hiccup of modernity), it's breast-feeding when not at home...because you are a lady that has a job, and stuff to do, but you want to breast-feed and ought to be able to, even if it means taking a T-O from the register. it isn't because there was some sudden realization that that is how babies eat, no one ever forgot about that. this is why it's at least a little disconcerting when anyone, even a strawlady, tries to take ppl to task for not raising em right. conversely, i think that's also why it's ok for someone to caution against codifying 'natural childcare' as the best way to raise a kid -- nothing to do with the practice itself, and everything to do with the fact that it's out of reach for many ppl, in a way that has nothing to do with their goals, interests, or dreams.

I wasn't breastfed, and I have severe emotional trauma

qe frikkin d

spitballin here but i think at least some of the stigma was not boob-related, and more a "why aren't you at home right now" type situation

nope, it's boob-related, and in fact people (usually catholic immigrants) have told my wife she shouldn't be breastfeeding in public.

btw there also used to be, at one time, a separate upper-middle-class/upper-class stigma attached to breastfeeding at all -- which I think was a combination of "if you're wealthy you get a wet nurse" and "why should a delicate upper class lady do something as vulgar as that" combined with, later, "science has given us this more perfect baby food so why breastfeed?"

I ended up dumping a lot of stats and stuff on the other thread, but yes, that came up a lot in my reading, negative associations with showing breast in public seemed strong partic in low-income communities. Breasts have been so sexualized that there seems to be a prominent strain of reasoning that they are ONLY sexual and breastfeeding is actually kind of weird and inappropriate.

I mean even to do at home! Like it has worked backwards and first shamed it in the public eye but then extended that even further to say that's it's gross, just generally.

It's interesting how being a dad changes that too -- like I remember in the first few months of K's life I probably saw at least several other women's breasts while they were breastfeeding (at parent meetups, etc.) and it just wouldn't even register with me that much (perhaps in part because I was in such a new dad exhausted stupor). Some women we were around just seemed to not care much themselves about feeding their babies in front of men, to the point that I remember on one occasion it took me a minute to take the hint that I should leave the room so a woman could breastfeed.

That said, I am curious if H agrees with me about the article, as she's the one actually staying home, breastfeeding, making purees from scratch, etc.

― look at this quarterstaff (Hurting 2), Wednesday, September 12, 2012 6:38 PM (Yesterday)

Haha no offense but this is a GOOD FUCKING QUESTION

I mean thank you for having the self-awareness to ponder the leche factory in the relationship

Too bad we can't just feed babies jizz eh? I mean, it would be equitable.