Stepping back from the noise.

[ritaxis]

I entered into a discussion about breastfeeding at James Nicoll's lj, and now I've exited it (without flouncing: I don't want to be that person). There's only so many responses a person can make without becoming an asshole. So here's my private musings about the fallout from the dscussion. I've not friendslocked this because why bother? But I'm not going out of my way to invite people to continue the discussion over here because, again, why bother? I think I'm doing this because I am annoyed, want to express my annoyance, and I don't want to keep arguing, but even more so because I want to be really clear in my mind about what I'm thinking and saying and doing, and this is an opportunity to work on that clarity.

One tremendously useful thing has come out of this. I've figured out why the phrase "agree to disagree" always makes me want to be violently rude. It's because "agree to disagree" actually means "agree that the less-privileged position will shut up and the more-privileged person will continue to say whatever they feel like, without challenge."

And the privileged position in this case is: "you can recommend breastfeeding, but you must put my very specific and unusual difficulties front and center to make sure you don't offend me."

One person (who says they're not intending to have children, so I don't know why they took this so hard: I never said everybody who raises babies has to breastfeed, them much less that everybody in the whole world has to breastfeed babies whether they have any babies or not) said that it was "deeply antifeminist" of me to suggest that breastfeeding is nearly free. Because see, this person makes 35 dollars an hour and so therefore they shouldn't be throwing that time away on baby care. I did point out that it takes more time to bottle feed a baby than to breastfeed them, and somebody else said -- oh, I forget, and I am too weary to go heck, but it was something to the order that you can have somebody else do all that icky baby feeding if you're not using the breast.

Several other people objected to my saying that breastfeeding becomes enjoyable after a while, because they knew somebody who didn't ever enjoy it but did it for two years or something anyway out of duty (I don't get that. Six months, yeah, but two years? For why? So you can throw it in the kid's face later when they aren't sufficiently grateful?).

Then there was "What if you're taking medications that babies shouldn't have in their breastmilk? What if your working hours are long and terrible?"

Honestly, there's individual exceptions to every epidemiological recommendation I can think of except perhaps for "don't smoke cigarettes" and "don't inhale carbon monoxide" amd "stop making candy and wallpaper colored with Paris green." Everybody should eat a nice amount of protein foods every day -- except if they have phenylketonuira. Everybody should eat foods rich in fiber -- except if they have certain malformations of the digestive tract. Children with chronic diarrhea should eat lots of rice, bananas, applesauce and toast and not much else till it resolves -- unless they have the apple allergy that causes diarrhea, skin rash, and potentially anaphylactic shock. With a bit of research I could go on.

It's a typically libertarian tack taken by typically privileged people. They find the rare exception and insist that it disproves the common (and scientifically demonstrated)situation. They debunk epidemiology. Reflexively, as far as I can tell, because also, as far as I can tell, none of these people actually want to tell people not to breastfeed -- they just don't want me to tell people to breastfeed. At least not in sincere, comprehensible language.

For a moment here and there I thought maybe they were confusing what I was saying with the weird narcissistic homeschool-novaccination-everything-has-to-be-done-in-the-most-difficult-and-intensive-manner people, but I don't think it was possible for a person to actually think that and be honest, given what I actually did say.

Apparently the reason James invited this shitstorm on his journal is that Michelle Obama has suggested that people should breastfeed their babies to cut down on the incidence of obesity. Apparently this is offensive to people. Of course this is a controversial subject on a lot of fronts. The science of obesity is not well developed. There's a lot of claimas about obesity that are dumb. The causal direction of the diseases of obesity are not clearly established, though since it looks like moderate weight loss improves health and longevity for a lot of obese people, there's something to the idea that it's better to be less obese than more. And there are studies that show greater incidence of obesity in people who were bottle-fed for their whole infancy. Trying to get a nice roundup of the studies led me to stuff I wasn't looking for, including abstracts of two studies about obese mothers and breastfeeding, one seeming to show that obese mothers were less likely to continue past 6 weeks than overweight ones, and another finding different prolactin levels in obese mothers and other mothers. I don't lknow anything about the quality of the studies, but that's interesting.

Apparently the Tea Party types are offended that Michelle Obama should be taking this on. Because, um, why? Because Michelle Bachmann has to oppose anything from Michelle Obama? There can be only one Michelle?

So, anyway, James asked whether it was a good thing to promote breastfeeding or whether we could just all agree to disagree, and I said I wouldn't agree to disagree, and gave a few of the arguments in favor of breastfeeding, and then I was told I was deeply antifeminist.

I swear, there are some really strange people hanging out at James's journal. A while back I said I thought it was selfish and wrong for post-menopausal women to enlist a big chunk of expensive medical care to reactivate their wombs to bear their "own" babies rather than spend those resources, for example, improving the lives of existing children, and one of the commenters suggested that I might possibly therefore be anti-abortion.

Originally I was going to go into a contrast between the kind of breastfeeding promotion I do, and the kind that these folks seem to think I should do, and the kind that hey seem to think I actually do. But it's taken me this long to say what I have said so far, and I do need to go to bed eventually. So I think I'll stop here.

On another front, I am in lesson 4 of "Chcete Mluvit Česky?" ("Do you want to speak Czech?") and I have found out why it is so hard to tell Czech verbs apart. It is because they tend to be made of base verbs plus prefixes that change their meaning in specific ways, for example, they make them into perfective or imperfective verbs, which are described as being verbs that finish and verbs that don't, though I can already tell that is an insufficient description. Other prefixes have functions more like what we're used to (those little bits of usually Latin detritus that indicate direction or whatever, except when they don't, like and obverse and converse and diverse and perverse and universe and subversive and like that there. But the thing is, Czech prefixes are not mostly from Latin, they are mostly from Old Slavonian or whatever that is, and they have a different logic that I have not grokked yet.

Also, the adverbs and preopisitions and conjunctions and quasi-pronouns and not-really-articles and occasional nouns and adjectives tend to sound a lot alike, much like words of those categories in English (these this that those there then thing thus: which who what why when where whither whence). Notice that these kinds of words in English don't come from Latin, they come from Old English. Anyway, I've learned some of these -- kdo kdy kde and I'm struggling with others -- ten tenhle tam tady taky ted' to ta which overlap because some of the same forms which are gender and case forms of one word are different gender and case forms of other words, and I just have to memorize the whole lot of them because there's no more logic to it than there is to English (probably no less as well, but I don't have a lifetime of experience with it).

Frank says there is no excuse for Czech, it is just a horrible language. But I don't know. Certainly it is a lot harder than Spanish, but I imagine that ninety percent of the world's languages are harder than Spanish.

On a further front, we had almost every possible kind of weather you can have in February in Santa Cruz in the last two days, with the exception of lightning and snow that sticks. And both of those are rare.

Comments

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Thank you for pinpointing exactly why I loathe "agree to disagree."

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, that's not what I mean by it and it's not how I use it. I use it when the argument between two equally strong and determined personalities has reached the point where both sides keep saying their piece in increasinlgy agressive ways and it's clear neither side is going to budge an inch and the argument is preventing anything more useful being said. As it's obvious no one is going to "win" there is no point in continuing and that phrase is my way of saying, "For heaven's sake, I'm not going to persuade you and you're not going to persuade me. Let's talk about something else."

But I've learned not to use the phrase on the Internet where it can be taken wrongly.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

OK, it's not the only reason I loathe it. :P

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

P.S. I peeked at the discussion. The way the question was phrased, there's no debate.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Actually, I thought of you when I was doing this entry. You may be flattered to know that when I was figuring out what I wanted to say I was thinking "how would this look to Lori?" because right now you're the person I know whose perspective is most likely to see where I'm saying what I mean to say, where I'm not, and where I have or haven't thought the thing through clearly.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Wow. I am flattered, sincerely.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Most of what I've seen of "take exceptions seriously" hasn't been from libertarians-- it's been from people who use the privilege model, and don't like being left out of the discussion.

I think a big piece of the problem is that English doesn't have a fast way of distinguishing between "I mean this advice for absolutely everybody" and "This is good for almost everybody".

It doesn't work emotionally to say "Do this" out loud, and then expect people to hear "but I understand common sense exceptions", especially when people don't agree on what the common sense objections are.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The "common sense exceptions" raised in this case were rare cases elevated to general positions.

When you promote generally good health advice, you don't put all the exceptions on the trifold handout or the store-window poster. Those exceptions are for a manual, or a help text (something like "What to do if things don't work out as you expect them to").

And "I'm personally too well-paid and precious and valuable to be bothered holding my baby" is really a lousy, lousy argument for me not telling young women that breastfeeding is better for their babies.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Especially when (in general) there ARE people around saying "everybody should do this". (Um; not referring specifically to the particular topic. It's very common that people, including people who should know better like doctors and nurses, try to ignore individual differences and get everybody to follow the average advice. Common enough that people get hyper-sensitized to it.)

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a problem with the English language, if only because I've had and witnessed thousands of conversations where the absence of such an obvious distinction has caused zero problems.

I don't think the issue is either "libertarian" or "privilege"—it's the rhetorical currency of SF fandom (which admittedly has plenty of libertarians and plenty of people blind to their own privilege). I read this sort of nitpicking as people attempting to perform their own intelligence. To say, "High school stinks but it gets better afterward" is a challenge—aha! not if you have cancer! not if you're raped in college! not if Obama gets all up in your business because of PC feminazis! Ook, ook, I'm the smart one, I win!

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

But see, I think that this kind of oppositional approach to reportage and analysis is a political thing in itself.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Political or politicized?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

political.

It's a contribution to the noise machine. You keep people from engaging with the world as it is and discussing things productively, which means you keep people from being able to take action, which means you allow the usual rich bastards to keep doing what they do without any effective response.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

The Rich Bastard problem is a hard one. We're 100% agreed on that. But I think that the rhetorical tactic of "but but but...one exception here so fuck you!" is not itself political, as it comes up in non-political contexts all the time. It's far more common in fandom than outside of it in my experience, especially when the implied "fuck you" is present. "Testing to destruction" is the gee-whiz pseudoengineering thingie, isn't it?

See, for example, any discussion of the distinctions between SF and fantasy.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I wasn't talking about people who are blind to their own privilege, I was talking about people who are pointing out other people's privilege.

For example, "it gets better" isn't reliably true if you stuck in low-paying work. This isn't all that rare.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

The existence of people who point out the privilege of others implies the existence of people who are blind to their own privilege.

Low-paying work is awful, indeed, but I'd rather the eighteen years of low-paying work I've done than my four years of high school over again, in an instant.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Apparently the reason James invited this shitstorm on his journal is that Michelle Obama has suggested that people should breastfeed their babies to cut down on the incidence of obesity.

That may be your impression but it's wrong.

I came across a strongly-worded claim that it's impossible to have a public discussion about breast-feeding versus bottle that doesn't quickly turn into an argument; not having encountered that claim before, I wanted to test it.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Well, what did you think of the results?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's not as heated as gun control [1] but I probably won't repeat the test any time soon.

1: Or, I guess, some discusses of vaccinations versus totally destroying herd immunity on the basis of a truly defective, fraudulent paper but I bet my LJ leans heavily against wracking up avoidable deaths from measles and mumps and such.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

And I was looking forward to the next poll as to whether or not mothers should be allowed to carry guns while breastfeeding!

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

"Which is more fitting as an adult activity: knitting or chess?"

[momomom.livejournal.com]

Oh please Sir, can we discuss circumsion next?

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Yup, I thought that was it, and managed, with some difficulty, to walk away before making *one* post. And I am not going to restart here either, though my views are very close to Lucy's.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

AOL.

[carbonel]

I would have thought some things don't need empirical testing, but presumably you hadn't run into that controversy before. Just reading rivka's LJ was enough for me, back then.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I am very, very glad that you stuck it out for as long as you did, and from a more powerful position than I could bring to bear. I have been very, very cross about the societal norm of breastfeeding sabotage, and the way that any corrective data sharing on my part has been received. (As I said in that discussion.)

I think you assessed the issue very clearly, and I'd like to share this with others, but I'm reluctant to bring drama to your journal. If you have suggestions for a good way to do this, I believe your insight (and those of some of the comments here) to be very valuable, and not available elsewhere.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

You can refer people here. Just tell them that I'm a front-line worker in the field of keeping babies alive and healthy and empowering their mothers for work, school, and fulfilling lives, or some such other really dramatic scene-setting.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I think I left before you did, but while I was there you sounded calm, rational, and sensible to me.

I hope I wasn't a problem; I was sucked into commenting early because at the time it seemed worth pointing out this was a fraught topic (in hindsight, the argument that that information could not at that point do anybody any good seems to have some merits), and then I was there.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem is that breastfeeding, like many aspects of parenting, has so much emotion wrapped up in and around things which should be simple but have a lot of unstated value judgements set up around them. It's a natural process which has been horrifically politicized and developed into a litmus test for what parent is more politically correct (yes, I breastfed, and yes, I was horrified by how political my local chapter of the La Leche League made it).

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Breastfeeding is political though. The person at James' lj who brought up pumping touched on it. If babies are going to get the best support for their development, women need more support tnan just moral support for breastfeeding. They need flexible working conditions and enough household resources to cut back to some degree for on working for a few months and access to truly supportive, flexible child care.

Of course, the italicized part will earn me again the label of "deeply antifeminist" because I dare to suggest that women may have a season in their lives when advancing their career and maximizing their income might not be at the top of their priority list, because don't you know that feminism is only about being successful in high-status careers and the concerns of women in other conditions of life are not relevant?

See what I mean? It's political. It's a class issue, too.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

As I recall, paid parental leave in Canada is 15 weeks for the mother plus 35 shared weeks for both parents. Pay is set at 55% up to a limit I don't recall.

Quebec has its own rules (of course), with longer and better paid parental leaves.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

"And that's why we must oppose Creeping Socialism and Socialized Medicine and Labor Laws!!! And taxes!!! Because undeserving mothers and babies and really really undeserving fathers will be featherbedding for nine months!!!!"

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Considering that other countries fracking pay women to stay home with their young children, I can't see where advocating for such consideration and reforms is particularly antifeminist (though I know those folks will continue to say so).

For that matter, I think men should be able to take time off to parent without sacrificing their careers, either. Parenting is important. Both of the young fathers in my school have taken paternity leave and they are very close to their young children. It's lovely to see. Another father has a daughter in the first grade (middle school social studies teacher) and he walks down every day to pick her up from school.

It's political. But it shouldn't be.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Canadian-style matleave is socially unsuitable for the US; not nearly punitive enough. Ideally, solutions to all social problems in the US should involve a prison.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

They need to involve a means test and an investigation into the person's moral rectitude, also, if not a full-on accusation of drug dealing and communism.

Sigh.

I was looking into Czech preschools, trying to find one just like ours, but the concept is untranslatable because Czech mothers get three years of paid maternity leave regardless of income. So they have "kindergartens" that theoretically start around two or three years and are for enrichment or therapy, not full-day childcare for the infants of fulltime students and workers.

I'm so selfish: my first response was "but then I wouldn't get to have my babies and mommies to serve!"

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Be faster just to treat women as enemy combatants - after all any fetus may be an undocumented terrorist anchor baby - which means legal procedures could be truncated.

A system suitable for the US (or at least North Dakota) would be to make pregnancy a capital offense. Women would be confined to prison for the duration of their pregnancy, thus giving them access to the best of prison health care, and if the baby was born alive, the death penalty would be stayed.

Compliance might be an issue so all women could be fitted with a forehead mounted blood chemistry monitor that lights up when they become pregnant. I'm thinking enforcement should be handled by Homeland Defense.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I bailed on that discussion in the sense that I read all (or most) of the comments in early stages, got annoyed, and never went back.

Your analysis of "agree to disagree" is interesting and sounds plausible to me. People (for example, me) are bad keeping count, so while I'll keep an eye out for it, I won't necessarily keep an accurate mental tally of how often in my experience it is used a club by those with privilege.

[momomom.livejournal.com]

Lucy, I must say I like your take on the politics of breastfeeding as well as the absurdities of the "yes, but" rants. Thank you.

I can't deal with most online discourse that has nearly any degree of conflict about topics near and dear to me though so I avoid breastfeeding and circumcision discussions because I feel SO strongly about the topics.

[kiya]

I don't get that. Six months, yeah, but two years? For why?

Well, at eighteen months it's still "Because I'm not interested in starving her." She wouldn't consider solids at all until she was around fourteen months.

Can't say I enjoy it; can say there are times I don't mind it.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

My daughter was weaned by the earthquake. My stepmother took her away for three weeks and when she came back I was dry. (she had been eating food since she was four months and stealing beets off my salad, but she was so uninterested in weaning at two and a half that I wondered how I was going to manage it)

I have no idea whether it's desirable to arrange a natural disaster to effect weaning, though . . .

[diminishedsheep.livejournal.com]

Really? I just remember the awful hotel room... And of course it would take a natural disaster to convince me to do something. Or not do, in this case.