review: Misconceptions

In the early 1990s, perched on a log by a remote lake waiting for a limnologist with whom I had a love/hate relationship, I started reading Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. With incongruous waders over his grungey flannel shirt and faded cargo shorts, the limnologist scooped up hundreds of microscopic animals in a huge net, while I read about how patriarchy fought women breaching its power structures by pushing impossible standards of beauty to which they could never measure up. For women entrapped by the beauty myth this meant that instead of working out how to finally smash that glass ceiling, they were more interested in just working out. Finding myself both persuaded and frustrated by her writing, I also started to develop a bit of a love/hate relationship with Naomi Wolf.

Some weeks later while watching Oprah - ahem! I mean, of course, studying for exams - I saw Ms Wolf hawking her book on the show. I felt just as vexed as I’m sure she did when Oprah’s audience offered the radical insight - to profound applause - that she didn’t need to worry about the beauty industry because she was so beautiful already. To her credit, she tried to alter the terms of this response and point out that it didn’t matter what people thought of her relative attractiveness, ‘beauty’ was not an intrinsic value but a normative culturally-constructed standard against which women were measured and found wanting. The audience remained skeptical.

I duly read her next two books as they came out: Fire with Fire: the New Female Power and How to Use It and Promiscuities: the Secret Struggle for Womanhood (or a Secret History of Female Desire). Once again, they contained interesting material and provocative arguments. But once again, I came away somewhat unsatisfied, not least because of her increasing use of purple prose to make her points. My abiding memory of these books is cringing over a sentence - I forget from which book - where she proclaimed that male sexual attention was ‘the sun in which she bloomed.’ Presumably meant as a riposte to the spectre of 1970s radical feminism, it just felt embarrassing.

So Naomi and I parted ways from the late 1990s: I went to Japan, she kept right on blooming and eventually became a mother. Her book on that subject, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected Journey into Motherhood came out in 2001. A decade later, as I too have followed in her footsteps and become a mother, we have met again for a catch-up. So how does Misconceptions measure up?

Her writing is still a mix of the purple, the personal and the political. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, of course. There were passages I vehemently agreed with, particularly those relating to the medicalisation of birth, and the shifts in identity of new mothers. But there were also many I found superficial, anecdotal (not in a good way) and untheorised. The sections on work and childcare were particularly thinly sketched: her survey of a handful of other mothers she knew (i.e. white, upper middle-class, urban professionals ... in her neighbourhood) gave an extremely skewed picture of how women negotiate (or not) the return to work. This basically boils down to having a nanny.

In a a couple of brief sentences, she mentions that other middle-class woman use day-care, and the working-class nannies themselves rely on low-paid babysitters for their own children, but these experiences are not really explored. While Wolf acknowledges the racial and class divisions between the nannies and the ‘working mothers’, she only narrates her discussion with one nanny, and this feels a little like a guilty afterthought. In a book that is so avowedly personal as well, she does not discuss her own work and childcare arrangements, nor put her own marriage under the spotlight in the way that she does those of her friends (spoiler: all the so-called feminist husbands are really bastards. From her descriptions, it sounds a bit to me like they were bastards all along. Here’s a sample:

‘Here’s the secret, Naomi,’ he said. ‘All the husbands I know are good guys. They honestly want things to be fair in their relationships. They are hands-on dads, and they want their wives to be happy and fulfilled. But when it comes down to it, there is no way they are going to sacrifice a career opportunity .... Bottom line? We know they won’t leave us,’ he said. ‘A: They love us. B: Because of the kids.’ (p 225)

But I digress.)

More powerful were her sections on pregnancy and birth. Here, she does examine in detail her own experiences of birth and what they showed up about the high intervention rate of births in the United States (scary!) and the way in which births can be manipulated for the financial benefits of the hospitals and medics in attendance. Hospital protocols, rather than the woman and baby, stipulate how long women will labour for, and the alarmingly high rate of caesareans (accompanied by epidurals, and other interventions) is a nice little earner for all concerned in a user-pays health system (big cheer for socialised medicine!).

After her first traumatic experience, Wolf sets out to explore the other options, talking to natural childbirth advocates, midwife practitioners, and women-centred obstetric practices. For her second birth, she takes the middle route: an obstetric practice with hands-on midwives who work in partnership with doctors to deliver babies. Avoiding the highly medicalised and de-personalised route she went the first time, and eschewing a drug-free birth as overly masochistic, she argues for a middle way between medicalised hospital births and natural home births, with midwives and doctors working together to provide the best outcomes for mother and baby.

This cri-de-coeur - ‘why can’t they all just get along?!’ - struck a chord with me. Throughout my pregnancy, I felt like I was in an invisible tug of war between the medical profession and midwives focussed on natural childbirth.This is partly because a) I had a stupid GP who told me midwives were dangerous and b) I chose a midwife who practised, and was an advocate for, natural birth. I have written before about how I didn’t appreciate being treated as an object (a car!) by my initial doctor, nor was I that thrilled about hearing repeatedly how midwives had won a law-change so they could practice autonomously from my midwife. After having read about Wolf’s experience (women still giving birth on their backs ... and in stirrups!), I now have much more understanding of what the midwives had fought for, and am grateful they did manage to get that law-change. At the time, however, I couldn’t have cared less. Like Wolf, I wanted the focus to be on me and the baby, with both doctors and midwives working together, and not feel like I was having to choose the winning team (and hoping like hell I picked the right one).

In the end, I did see a lot of doctors, and had a range of interventions. But, throughout, and afterwards, I had the support of my midwife, who was fantastic. I only wish I hadn’t spent nine months feeling so pulled in different directions, not really knowing what was what nor who to properly trust, before I was actually pulled in different directions by my own birth experience.

'I'm pregnant, now what can I eat ...?'

Once my initial doctor had managed to get past the automotive metaphors, and started to engage a little more with me as a pregnant woman rather than a sprained ankle attached to a sportsperson, he started giving me the hard word on what I should and shouldn’t eat. His nurse, who was only marginally warmer than he was - at least she congratulated us - handed me an envelope full of guidelines and advertisements dressed up as information to wade through on the subject of good nutrition in pregnancy. There was specific information on the risks associated with certain foods.

With a heavy heart, I had already forsworn sushi. Not being a meat-eater and rarely having the opportunity to eat shellfish (which was also banished), I had thought I was pretty much OK with everything else. So it was with an even heavier heart, that I read through the list. Soft cheeses were out, even if pasturised, as were eggs with runny yolks (bye bye eggs benedict, it was nice knowing you). Any deli food, including salads, which had been standing rather than freshly cooked was off the menu. My work lunch options were starting to narrow alarmingly. As I read further, I was surprised to note that hummus - made from cooked chickpeas, pounded sesame seeds, lemon juice, garlic and olive oil - was out too. I realise it is about risk rather than intrinsic harmfulness, but is it really possible to catch listeria from the humble chickpea? Then I thought it must be the anaemic kind that you buy at the supermarket, and momentarily cheered myself with the thought that this was the moment to start making it myself. Not so, according to the food police, even the home-made variety was suspect.

At this point, I started to panic. What on earth was I going to eat? I couldn’t just live on biscuits (which, being thoroughly cooked, were surprisingly OK), rock-hard scrambled eggs and rice for nine months. Not to worry, however. The morning sickness soon kicked in with a vengeance and I was lucky if I could keep down some plain pasta and peas.

Little did I realise that this was the first in a slew of attempts to police my body and appetites in the guise of being ‘for the good of the baby.’ Given that most pregnant women are concerned for the health of their unborn child, what is particularly insidious about this long list of dos and don’ts is that it guilt-trips women into policing themselves and each other. How shocking is it, for example, to see a pregnant woman having a sip of wine, and God forbid, having a tasty slice of brie with it? You can practically hear the CYFS hotline number being punched into a hundred mobile phones.

But it doesn’t end there. Far from it. I have an acquaintance who is determined to breastfeed for as long as possible till her child is possibly even three or four, not, apparently, because she wants to (though I presume she does), but because the ‘World Health Organisation recommends it’. The WHO actually states:

Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond (my emphasis).

So it’s hardly an edict. It seems a little over the top to continue breastfeeding because some suits in Geneva recommend it (and that’s not exactly what they say, in any case). I note that it is the World Health Organisation too: they offer best practice advice to mothers all over the world, not just those in wealthy nations. So it’s probably preferable to continue breastfeeding in places where the alternatives are to drink formula or powdered milk made with unsafe water (hang your head in shame, Nestlé) resulting in disease and death.

In New Zealand, we have the luxury of not having to make that ‘choice’. Given that it’s not such a life or death situation, I can’t help but feel that the food police and the breastfeeding zealots are part and parcel of the same thing: the control of women’s bodies and appetites. Of course, some expectant mothers do eat soft cheese, hummus and have the odd cheeky glass of wine, probably with the added frisson of doing something they shouldn’t. A bit like having a piece of cake when you’re meant to be on a diet: a transgression against the regime of disciplining the body into society’s expectations of it. Only, pregnant women aren’t meant to diet. So it seems that food dos and don’ts offer a replacement regime to which women should either rigidly stick or from which they guiltily fall off the wagon. It seems that there’s no escape from the beauty myth.

Of course, it is also tied up with perfect mother syndrome. Falling into line with the prevailing wisdom on appropriate nutrition for you while pregnant, or for the baby once it is born, is a way of ensuring that you are doing the right thing, even while others may not. That it’s also submitting to someone else’s idea of how you should run your life might not even enter the frame.

I have to confess that I was one of the more scrupulous pregnant women: I sadly passed the sushi counter sniffing the air like a melancholic puppy, passed on the blue cheese and camembert at work functions, and didn’t even think about wine, let alone hummus, that horror of horrors. I even consulted a book called I’m Pregnant, Now What Do I Eat?

In retrospect, I am a little surprised at my docility. At the time, however, I felt apprehensive. I was worried that something I might do, whether inadvertent or intentional would harm the baby. Of course, there are some risks, but, as I am increasingly finding, babies are more resilient than we are led to believe. Mothers I know who did eat hummus and soft cheese while pregnant delivered healthy babies, with no sign yet of their having suffered through exposure to chickpeas and processed milk in utero. So is it the baby we are protecting by being so vigilant or dominant cultural values that primarily define women according to their bodies?