Clearly, the well-intentioned forebears of the breastfeeding message were not movement-building specialists. If they had been, they likely would not have been complicit in ringing the movement death knell of “choice.” They sought to encourage women to choose to breastfeed by arming them with facts. Those facts included information about what’s wrong with formula but not what’s wrong with society. They courted women as the sole decision makers on infant feeding without considering how women were being influenced by societal barriers, partners, relatives, and marketing influences. These forebears armed women with the information without showing women how they were being impeded from exercising a very basic right. A review of women’s history reveals that linking controversial topics like abortion to generally accepted values and basic rights has been extremely effective.
I am back to Gopal and the steady hum of his voice. “Movements need to be organized around identities that are important to the audience,” he said. This is an important insight, because, really, is mother an identity that we rally around? Yes, it’s an important identity, but our social norms push us to prove that we are not solely mothers—that we haven’t “lost ourselves” in motherhood. Women shy away from rallying around that identity because we’ve been told mothering is demeaning work. And when we do rally, we’re often in defensive mode justifying our choices.
The movement has tried to mobilize women around scientific facts about the benefits of breastfeeding instead of organizing them around the quality of their life, around the fact that women have basic reproductive rights, and around their status as potential change agents more broadly. These are lives that lack paid maternity leave, affordable child care, and financially viable part-time work, to name a few. Those two approaches to building support among women are very different with very different outcomes—and have been critical missteps in the overall failure of the breastfeeding leadership throughout the years to fully meet its own goals.
From a communication perspective, the movement has suffered from an overreliance on scientists and medical experts, as if feeding decisions were purely rational and based on facts only. But mothers are suffering from expert overload, and modern mothers’ concept of who is the authority on motherhood has transitioned from professionals to peers. The industry’s heavy leaning on scientific research also discounts the complicated relationship that some communities of color have with the medical profession. For example, between 1932 and 1972, the government conducted a forty-year study that intentionally left six hundred black men untreated for syphilis in the well-documented Tuskegee Experiment. The men had no idea that they were involved in a study and were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” when, in fact, the only data being collected was from their autopsies. Thus, in one of the most horrible scandals of the medical industry, they were deliberately left to degenerate and die from the effects of advanced syphilis, which include tumors, blindness, and heart disease. Even the surgeon general of the United States participated in enticing the men to stay in the experiment, sending them certificates of appreciation after twenty-five years in the study. In 1997 President Bill Clinton apologized to the country and the eight remaining survivors, calling the experiment “morally wrong” and “racist.” The Tuskegee Experiment is an often-referenced point in African Americans’ widespread distrust of the medical community and the government. The cultural nuances of who trusts the medical and scientific community is often missed in breastfeeding messaging.
Common messaging also refers to nursing rooms as “accommodations,” as if employers are doing women some special favor for facilitating a biological need. As a cultural norm, men urinate standing up, but a urinal is not considered an “accommodation” for men—it is just the standard. This is exactly what women deserve: lactation facilities as the norm, instead of being made to feel they are being done a favor because of their unique biological needs.
Physician, Heal Thyself
The breastfeeding leadership is not without its own problems. The national breastfeeding committees, state coalitions, lactation-industry associations, major public health departments, national WIC, advocates, and allies must be mobilized as well. However, instead of leading women, they have in many ways come to mimic the problem—divided, frustrated, and with a gaping racial disparity in their professional ranks. The infighting is often exacerbated as the lactation industry begins to resemble the medical industry and as the multiple layers of certifications for lactation professionals get in the way of mass mobilization. At the top of the professional heap are International Board Certified Lactation Consultants (IBCLC); then there are Certified Lactation Consultants (CLC) and Lactation Consultants (LC); then there are peer counselors. IBCLCs are considered the gold standard for lactation support, and the certification requires advanced medical classes, ninety “clock” hours of lactation education, a thousand hours of supervised clinical experience, and eight college courses to then take a lengthy and costly exam. The process for certification is confusing: three “pathways” are offered, and the rules change often. As one physician who is also an IBCLC quipped, “compared to becoming an IBCLC, becoming a medical doctor was easy.” The changing rules create barriers for newer, younger, and more diverse women to enter the field, particularly as the cost of access to this elite rank rises. Without a doubt, when dealing with preemies or serious lactation problems, such as tongue-tie in an infant or breast infections, an IBCLC is the professional you need. But for the most common of lactation challenges, one of the lower levels of certification such as an LC, CLC, or peer counselor just may do. This realization, that most lactation problems are not medical but emotional or psychological, is not always welcomed by all IBCLCs. There’s also a big push for mother-led support, as more moms look to peers for advice, which is being resisted by some certified lactation professionals. Jobs for IBCLCs are growing but still limited compared with other health jobs. Nonprofits focused on breastfeeding scramble for limited funding. As a result, instead of leading with vision, they often lead with fear—warning women about risks instead of showing them the way forward. Grassroots organizations and nonprofits are in dread of losing funding. Lactation professionals are in dread of losing “ownership” of breastfeeding as more players are brought into the field, yet opportunities remain limited. And in that space, it is hard to create the kind of vision that is needed to effectively mobilize women and men for widespread societal change.
The clock is ticking. Any movement-building strategist worth his protest sign will tell you that social movements have life cycles. There are often only small windows of opportunity to act—such as with Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus. Those are critical moments to motivate collective action. But those windows close quickly, and no one knows when they may open again. I strongly believe that we are at one of those times. Yes, there are sizable challenges to overcome. Many are systemic and deeply rooted.
Two of them are right in front of us, literally.
• 8 •
Boob Control: The Sexualization of Breastfeeding
Scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts is to make males stupid.
—DAVE BARRY
It was the nipple that changed life as we know it. The halftime show at Super Bowl XXXVIII easily goes down in history as one of the most memorable incidents since the creation of television. The 2004 show was a collaboration by the year’s top pop stars, including Kid Rock, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Janet Jackson. But the performance took a sharp turn from a PG rating when Justin Timberlake neared the end of his single “Rock Your Body” and tore off a piece of Janet’s bustier, apparently intending to leave the red lace bra underneath intact. Instead, he grabbed both the bustier and bra, and her nipple was inadvertently exposed to over 140 million viewers. Shock and horror ensued over “Nipplegate.” It was one thing to have Jackson’s breast pushed all the way up, but a darkened nipple for American families to see? This was too much. The crime against America’s mo
st unifying form of entertainment lasted for all of 9/16ths of a second, but the FCC received a record-setting 1.4 million complaints, and the episode provoked national outrage. The FCC and all the producing entities involved, including the NFL and MTV, immediately changed their policies for working with artists in live settings. A legal battle ensued between CBS and the FCC, with CBS ultimately being fined $550,000. The expression “wardrobe malfunction” entered the American vernacular, and by 2008 the Chambers Dictionary acknowledged the term. Janet Jackson’s nipple literally changed the world.
That’s no hyperbole. For the millions that did see the infamous wardrobe malfunction, there were still millions more who did not. At that time, there was no way to go back and rewatch the show unless you had taped it. The media frenzy over Nipplegate and the scores who did not see it led to an uptick in TiVo subscriptions. But it also inspired three tech guys, who missed out on the salacious event and couldn’t find any videos of the incident online, to start working on the code to create a site where people could upload their own content for all to see. That site ended up being YouTube, a current staple of modern-day existence, which launched not long after. Much of YouTube’s initial success was in part due to people looking for clips of Janet and Justin’s performance and, more specifically, Janet’s breast. In just one year, Google saw the potential of the site and purchased it for over $1.5 billion plus Google stock, making the founders very wealthy. Indeed, the sensationalization of the nipple has changed cultural history.
Never before had communication commissions, culture critics, columnists, and California tech start-ups paid so much attention to one nipple. Suffice it to say, our culture is still overly obsessed with voyeurism as it relates to the female breast. It’s worth noting that men have breasts too—including breast tissue, a nipple, and areola. The only difference is that women’s breast tissue grows larger and produces milk. Yet the female areola is the most sexualized circular body part in the United States.
Women’s breasts are exposed everywhere, in television, films, magazines, and constantly in advertising. Every day society continues to serve up a poisonous diet of images that fragment women into mere body parts, starting with breasts. They are readily used to sell chicken wings, burgers, and beer, but the potential of exposing a breast while breastfeeding changes everything. As a result, nursing in public is mostly tolerated only in private rooms or under cover, and mothers are still being harassed or asked to leave restaurants, malls, movie theaters, and even airplanes for breastfeeding their babies—even though breastfeeding is a protected act in nearly all states and not subject to indecency laws. Rarely do several weeks pass before there is another media story of a security guard, bus driver, flight attendant, retail employee, or manager booting out a breastfeeding mom. A woman from Texas was told to leave a Victoria’s Secret, of all places, and nurse in an alley beside the store so that nobody would see her breastfeed. The mother was obviously shocked to learn that a store that caters to female parts and sells push-up bras would not be accommodating toward a woman wanting to use her breasts to feed her hungry child. That is, instead of dressing them up in lacy material for visual pleasure.
Oddly enough, the sexualization of the female breast has not always been the case. Nor did the change come from nature. It was society that sexualized the breast. The slow turn of events was accelerated by the World War II pinup-girl poster, postwar soft porn such as Playboy magazine, and the popularity of such Hollywood icons as Marilyn Monroe. Society’s very complex relationship with breasts complicates breastfeeding, which involves attaching an infant to the most provocative and highly sexualized female body part. It creates an incongruity: the breast is also a source of infant nutrition. Breastfeeding is not just a biological process but also a culturally determined behavior strongly influenced by the environment it occurs in. And when that culture constantly dictates that breasts are sexual objects, the consequences are dangerous. As breasts became more sexualized, they became less functional: more the purview of men and sexual objects and less in service of infants and a source of food. This hypersexualization of breasts has alienated many women and caused some mothers not only to fear breastfeeding in public but also to rethink breastfeeding altogether.
As the transformation of the breast from food to fun continued, the idea of breastfeeding in public became more abnormal and taboo. It became a socially acceptable notion that breastfeeding should be hidden from the view of others, that it is a private act using sexual parts. This put breastfeeding in the unique position of being both a private act, shrouded in individualism and personal choice, and, at the same time, a very public matter that opens mothers up to scrutiny and shaming from strangers. Breastfeeding began as a public matter because of an appropriate public health interest in infant health and survival. As infant health and mortality rates improved, breastfeeding was framed more as a mother’s personal preference, but the public involvement continued. The scientific advances of human milk substitutes freed the breast from feeding to focus more on pleasuring men. Since the breast also represents femaleness, this public health concern for the health of babies warped into other anxieties about women’s bodies, including their sexuality and the physicality of feeding at the breast. Undercurrents of body politics, such as which women’s bodies deserve to be seen as pure or trustworthy versus which bodies need to be controlled also emerged in the conversation. These issues provide an important lens to how all women’s bodies have historically and continuously been involved in culturally derived conflicts. From a sociological standpoint, the underlying notion tells us a lot about how people see and understand women and their breasts. The answer: as sex objects. We are all affected by the double standard to body politics, whether we are mothers or not.
At every turn, women are fed messages that breastfeeding ruins your breasts or that a baby will bite your breasts or that, God forbid, your breasts will be less desirable to a man because of breastfeeding. Some women fear that breastfeeding will permanently change the shape of their breasts, so they don’t do it. A UK magazine called Mother & Baby came under fire when the deputy editor told readers that she bottle-fed her baby because, “I wanted my body back and to give my boobs at least a chance to stay on my chest rather than dangling around my stomach. They’re part of my sexuality too, and when you have that attitude, seeing your teeny, tiny, innocent baby latching on where only a lover has been before it feels, well, a little creepy.” The anti-breastfeeding overtone of her words resulted in six complaints to the British Press Complaints Commission and prompted a heated debate. However, many moms, including Beyoncé, have also publicly stated that they stopped breastfeeding because they “wanted their body back.” The message behind the refrain is that I want my breasts back as sex objects. I want to return my breasts to men. I want my body back to diet and lose weight to meet some standard of postbaby aesthetics. All of which sound more like continued female repression than some forward-thinking self-expression.
Even some modern-day feminists promote this “breastfeeding kills your sexy” view. In “The Conflict,” French feminist philosopher Élisabeth Badinter warns of the “ayatollahs of breast-feeding” (in reference to the La Leche League) and writes of the “despotism of an insatiable child” and the “tyranny of maternal duty.” But she also suggests that a nursing mother “is not necessarily an object of desire for the father watching her” and condemns nursing as an activity that “may well obliterate the woman-as-lover and endanger the couple.” Women feel forced to choose between their maternal bodies, which belong to their babies, or their sexual bodies, which belong to their male partner. It sends a confusing and contradictory message to women because breastfeeding is often associated with the ideals of being a “good” mother. Yet breasts are sexualized, and women desire to make them attractive to men. That leaves women in a can’t-win paradox: they either breastfeed and prepare to be ostracized for using sexual objects for feeding or they feed their child formula and deal with the stigma of being labeled a “bad
” mother. They can either fear they will be less desirable to male partners or fear they will be judged by other women. Either way, women are caught in the crosshairs.
The consequences of body politics are hard to ignore. For example, for years, physicians, scientists, and behaviorists have recognized the importance of the bonding benefits of breastfeeding for strengthening the mother-child dyad and for child development. Yet when this acknowledged bonding and developmental need collides with the sexuality of women’s bodies, there are dangerous attempts to measure and control how this attachment should be executed. Where should this happen? And, for how long?
The need to limit and determine how long a woman’s breast can be used for mothering was apparent in May 2012, when Time magazine ran one of its most provocative covers in recent history. It featured Jamie Lynne Grumet, a twenty-six-year-old Los Angeles mother pictured breastfeeding her three-year-old son while he was standing on a chair to nurse on his mother’s exposed breast. The headline: Are You Mom Enough? The cover story is actually about attachment parenting, a growing trend that includes extended breastfeeding, cosleeping, and baby wearing, but the cover photo with a child who looks too grown to be breastfed and Grumet’s defiant look sent the Internet and social media ablaze. Commenters warned that the child would be psychologically scarred from nursing at such an age.
The Big Letdown Page 20