Dinner for Two

You are what you eat.

Apparently.

For pregnant women, the stakes are even higher: your baby is what you eat too.

As if women aren’t already constantly scrutinised about their physical appearance - and how it is related to the amount of their environment that they consume and burn as fuel for energy - what women eat while pregnant becomes a minefield that not only has the potential to affect them but also their babies. 

In addition to the usual body image anxiety, add to the list:

• concerns with food safety (step away from the hummus, put down that california roll lest lurking listeria get you) - I've blogged about this previously.
• concerns with eating healthily (bye bye burgers, hello bulgar wheat)
• concerns with ‘unusual’ pregnancy cravings 
• concerns with ideal weight gain (apparently, between 25-35 pounds for women of ‘normal’ weight) 
• and, for some, concerns about the re-activation of previous problems with eating 

As if pregnancy wasn’t exhausting enough. Surely, you’d think if there’s any time in their lives when women get a ‘pass’ on the way they look and what they eat, it’s when they're pregnant, right?

Wrong.

Today, I was flicking through a women’s magazine at a cafe and spotted an article comparing the pregnancies of Kate Middleton and Kim Kardashian.  Ordinarily, I’m not particularly interested in  what either of them are up to. This particular article caught my eye, however, because it was about the amount of weight both women had gained during their pregnancy. Both are due around mid-2013, so are well into their third trimesters. 

Kate Middleton - whose natural build appears to be tall and slim - was being censured for being too skinny, not gaining enough weight, being too controlled in what she ate, and hiding her bump under tailored coats and dresses. By contrast, Kim Kardashian, who is shorter and more ‘curvaceous’ (bleurgh!) - was being censured for being too fat, gaining too much weight, eating whatever she wanted, and letting her fertile and full figure spill out of form-fitting clothes and flowy pants-suits. 

God forbid either woman could be just left alone to get on with it. 

Which begs the question that if these two women represented the too-little and too-much of the pregnant body, who is the woman who has the ideal shape? 

Could that be ... um ... nobody?

The article was couched in terms of concern for the food and body issues each woman must be experiencing. Clearly, Kate and Kim are well-off enough to look after themselves. The faux-concern expressed in this article was targeted less at them, and more at the readers of the magazine, who may well compare themselves to both Ks and find themselves wanting.

This is called the shaming and policing of gender.  

So what else would you expect from a women’s magazine, you might think. Fair enough.  But this policing of diet during pregnancy doesn’t begin and end with celebrity adulation.

I’ve blogged previously about  Annie Murphy Paul’s excellent book on fetal origins research. But she also had me fuming when it came to the topic of eating and pregnancy. In the ‘two months’ chapter, she focuses on the effects maternal nutrition has on the foetus. In the personal narrative part of the chapter, Paul acknowledged the anxiety she felt over her own food choices during pregnancy:

No activity of everyday life is so instantly changed by pregnancy as eating. New worries about food safety turn ordinary meals into minefields ... Is the cheese pasteurised? Is the fish cooked through? Is the egg still runny, the meat still pink? More daunting still is the notion that what you eat becomes the very stuff of which your child is made ... I did my best to eat healthily, but I continually second-guessed my choices, berated myself for my slip-ups, worried that I was missing some crucial nutrient ... Eating is no longer a simple bodily function, much less a pleasure to be savoured; it’s a series of fraught choices, an act with grave consequences, committed three times a day. (Origins, pp 12-3)

She then traces a brief history of (predominantly male) control of pregnant women’s appetites from Galen, to the Bible to modern medicine. Everyone, it seems, has had something to say about what women eat while pregnant. Again, it is couched in terms of concern: a 2009 study found that overweight women are more likely to have complications and require interventions during birth; further studies found that overweight women were significantly more likely to have overweight children than those of a ‘normal’ weight’. By comparison, such ‘natural experiments’ as tracing the birth outcomes of children born to mothers who were starved during the Dutch hunger winter, also showed that their children were at higher risk of future health problems.  It seems then, that are sound reasons for being concerned about extreme weight gain - or loss - in pregnancy.

So far, so fair enough.

After her gambol through the research, however, Paul then returned to the effect all of this new knowledge had on her own pregnancy diet.  That’s when it all got a little annoying. In narrating her attempts to find substitutes for un-fit food - like tuna salad (too much mercury) - Paul sounds somewhat like a woman’s magazine herself when she extolls the virtues of other fish:

Soon I’m finding all kinds of ways to eat fish: Sardines on buttered toast for breakfast (delicious with scrambled eggs). A snack of herring on crackers with a dab of Dijon mustard. For dinner, shrimp sauteed in butter with garlic and cayenne pepper. Catfish, breaded and broiled golden. Tilapia on the grill, with some mango salsa to perk up its admittedly anemic flavour. ... As I tuck into a snowy filet of flounder, squeezed with lemon and speckled with pepper, I think to myself: eating carefully can actually taste really good. (Origins, p 34)

I mean, really? And wtf is tilapia? (This, apparently)

Later we see her get advice from a nutritionist about eating a ‘colourful’ plate of food, who also dreams up a shopping list full of acceptable whole grains and suitable salad (that would be ‘arugula not romaine lettuce’).  Then we follow her to the whole food store while she fills her basket with all this stuff. Oh, and a ‘naughty’ bar of a dark chocolate at the end.

It wasn’t just the nausea I was experiencing at the time that made me feel sick while reading this chapter. 

Given that morning sickness was dominating my dietary choices, or lack of them, at the time, I was intrigued to note that not once in this chapter does she mention morning sickness.

For me, during this period, I found it easiest to keep down well-cooked fatty and salty food - like hot chips or a samosa - rather than salads or just about any kind of vegetable. Indeed, even the - not every strong - aroma of lettuce (iceberg, if you must know) made me gag. This being round two, my feeling was ‘just go with it, you can try and eat better once you’re feeling better’. The Pollyannish chirruping about ‘eating carefully can actually taste really good’ did not improve my mood much, however.

But that wasn’t all.

Even the teeny tiny iodine pills I was taking conspired against me. Not only did taking them during my first trimester continuously make me gag, the ‘helpful’ leaflet included in the packet said things like ‘eat a low fat healthy diet’, ‘eat slowly and chew throughly before swallowing’, and ‘eat lots of fresh fruit, vegetables, whole grain foods / bread’ but ‘eat less fried / processed food; pastry; takeaways, biscuits, cakes, fizzy drinks, sweets, sugar, white bread; chippies.’  In my pregnancy so far, I have to plead guilty to eating every single thing on the ‘eat less’ list - many more than once - and rather fewer on the ‘eat lots’ one.

Does this make me a bad mother-to-be?

Frankly, I doubt it.  The long-term nutritional advantages that I enjoy as a middle-class woman in good health living in a country with abundant fresh food, means that I have had enough to eat of a wide variety of foods - and the nutrients within them - just about every day of my life. This in turns means that my unborn child will be enjoying those benefits too. The odd plate of chips or some Whittaker’s creamy milk is not going to undo that.

There’s still the food safety angle of course.  But then who does set out to get food poisoning? Instead, I think it’s about seeing it in terms of risk: do you think it’s worth the risk to eat a particular ‘banned’ food during pregnancy or not? In my first pregnancy, I would’ve said emphatically not. I religiously avoided everything that was on the list of banned foods ... and even some that weren’t ‘just in case’.  My baby turned out fine.  This time round, I’m a bit more relaxed. I still steer clear of raw fish and runny yolks, but I have - gasp - eaten (pasteurized) soft cheese, hummus, vegetarian sushi and some deli food. And you know what? So far, so good (she says, touching every piece of wood available).   

For now, what I need to steer clear of as hazardous to my health is well-meaning concern and advice about what I should and shouldn’t be eating. As an adult woman, I’m perfectly able to navigate my own food choices ... and also to deal with whatever consequences might ensue. 

But I also dream of life post-birth when I can enjoy the simple pleasures of runny poached eggs and raw salmon sushi without a twinge of guilt or the need to second-guess myself.

review: Cinderella Ate My Daughter

My gender-myth-busting holiday reading this year was the entertaining Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Line of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (2011) by US author Peggy Orenstein. Orenstein not only questions the narrow, gendered nature of products aimed at young girls, but also the commodification of their nascent sexuality.

Perfect Christmas reading.

With a rapidly growing and increasingly independent daughter to guide, Orenstein navigates her way through literally thousands of gendered products that peddle narrow and confining definitions of girlhood. They seem to offer the pursuit of physical perfection (for later pursuit of a perfect prince) as virtually the only route to female empowerment. Mass commercialisation has spread that message faster and younger than ever before (or so I’m told in the book’s dust-jacket). Knowing all this - or, at least, fearing it - what do you do when you’re confronted with the reality of young daughters who want princess dresses, glittery make-up, Bratz dolls and Hannah Montana CDs?  

This book is Peggy Orenstein’s attempt to answer that question.

Orenstein’s mode of address is intriguing in its mix of the confessional and investigative. She opens by confiding to the reader ‘why she wanted a boy’. As a noted public commentator on raising girls in a number of earlier works, she was suddenly stricken at the thought of having to put her money where her mouth was. Or, as she puts it, ‘What if, after all, I was not up to the challenge myself? What if I couldn’t raise the ideal daughter? With a boy, I figured, I would be off the hook (pp 1-2).’ In an earlier post, I blogged  about how I had had similar, if temporary, misgivings.

The more personal parts of this book are tales of her ‘trial-and-error’ approach and rueful admissions of what appears to be failure (e.g. finding out that her three-year- old daughter was fully conversant with the story of Snow White - when Orenstein herself had never told her the story - and was able to use it to manipulate other kids to find her ‘the right princes’ among the little boys present pp 11-12). As the review in the New York Times noted, she argues with herself, questions her assumptions, attempts a answer and then has second thoughts. It’s as if you’re right there in the consciousness of a another parent, not a detached ‘expert’ of the kind I’ve discussed in a previous post.

Orenstein traverses a number of topics in this book: 

• the pinkification of a little girl’s world as represented in an annual industry toy fair displaying thousands of pink products (‘why has girlhood become so monochromatic?’ p 35); 
• the craze for princess-everything (considered by a number of parents to be a ‘safe’ outlet that ‘fends off premature sexualisation’ p 24); 
• the development of Disney Princesses from 2000 onwards (ever noticed how they never look at each other when they’re pictured together? Disney Princesses are emphatically not about friendship and female solidarity p 23); 
• fairy tales (including the ways in which their narrative tropes recur - particularly, as the title makes clear, that of Cinderella, who is swept off her feet by a handsome prince. Twilight, anyone?)
• child beauty pageants - admittedly well-trodden ground but Orenstein takes a different angle: reality programmes like Toddlers and Tiaras offer audiences a voyeuristic experience: ‘They also reassure parents of their own comparative superiority by smugly ignoring the harder questions: even if you agree that pageant moms are over the line in their sexualisation of little girls - way  over the line - where, exactly, is the line, and who draws it and how? (p 76)
• and, bringing the book right up to date, electronic media including the gendered use of virtual worlds and social media (which can lead to increased bullying - and studies have shown that girls are more subject to online victimisation than boys)

Adding up all these things, Orenstein (and the reader) can’t help but conclude that conventional cultural scripts concerning femininity for girls are ambivalent at best, and an impediment to healthy development at worst.

But, having identified all that, what is a parent to do? Lock her daughter up like a latter-day Rapunzel? Be the parent who says ‘no’ to everything? Or makes her daughter into a figure of fun - or, worse, a target for bullies - amongst her peers?  Orenstein doesn’t offer firm or glib answers, but a narrative of her own attempts to answer those questions.

One example of Orenstein’s confusion is when she learns of a friend’s 14-year old son’s nonchalant response to a topless photo from one of his female classmates (and not even one he knew well). Orenstein was initially torn between amazement at the girl’s bravado and apparent body confidence but also a nagging suspicion that ‘something didn’t sit right’ and that this might be old-fashioned sexual objectification dressed up in the more modern guise of Facebook and (pseudo-)empowerment. An expert in human sexuality studies helped her articulate what was behind her mixed feelings:

Girls like the one I have described are not connected more deeply to their feelings, needs or desires. Instead, sexual entitlement itself has become objectified; like identity, like femininity too, it, too, has become a performance, something to ‘do’ rather than to ‘experience.’ Teasing and turning boys on might give girls a certain thrill, even a fleeting sense of power, but it will not help them understand their own pleasure ... [or] allow them to assert themselves in intimate (let along casual) relationships. (pp 170-171)

I enjoyed this book a lot, although it had some limits. It sometimes spoke a little too much of its own bubble - a privileged, Californian, liberal enclave - to be totally relatable. It also focussed almost exclusively on the gendered experience of girls, something Orenstein acknowledges at the outset. This is largely because she has a daughter and not a son, so the issues are more personally pressing for her in a way that those affecting boys aren’t. I’d be interested to read a similar account that focussed on boys. 

When it comes to talking about the construction of gender, however, focussing on girls is not an intrinsic weakness. The process of gendering girls and boys is linked. In her landmark 1990 book Gender Trouble, theorist Judith Butler describes gender not only as performative but also as productive: it forms part of a heterosexual matrix, which juxtaposes ‘approved’ heterosexuality with ‘subversive’ homosexuality. In the normative view of the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality, conventionally masculine males are meant to desire conventionally feminine females. Masculinity and femininity - which comprise the 'gender ' part of the matrix - are most heavily policed as the visible signifiers of sexuality. A feminine male therefore becomes suspect, as does a masculine female. This is called the shaming and policing of gender, and it affects boys and men as much as girls and women. Orenstein’s book might focus on the gendered world of little girls, but this also impacts little boys, not least in how they will perceive their female family members and friends, and, later, potential partners (well, if they’ve got the script ‘right’, that is ...)

On the plus side, I appreciated Orenstein’s wit and self-awareness: in ‘It’s All About the Cape,’ she lamented the dearth of female super-heroes who could provide alternatives to the mania for princesses. Looking back with nostalgia on her own Wonder Woman phase, Orenstein wanted her daughter to experience a similar sense of invincibility, freedom and power. A little later, however, she admits: ‘I did a little digging about Wonder Woman. It turns out her real name was Diana, daughter of Hera, queen of the Amazons. That makes her, of all things ... a princess.’ (p 158)

What I most appreciated about this book, however, is that Orenstein put herself out there: her ideals, her rude awakenings, her daughter’s (sometimes unwitting) challenges to her deeply-held beliefs. She doesn’t advocate total abstinence from a gendered, consumerist culture - as if that were possible - but rather taking an informed and aware approach (advertisers are not your friend). She closes by sharing the insight she has gained along the way:

Our role is not to keep the world at bay but to prepare our daughters so that they can thrive within it. That involves staying close but not crowding them, standing firm in one’s values, while remaining flexible ... I’m not saying we can and will do everything ‘right’, only that there is power - magic - in awareness. If we start with that, with wanting girls to see themselves from the inside out rather than the outside in, we will go a long way toward helping them find their own happily-ever-afters. (p 192)

Let's see how it works out ....

another brick in the wall?

This week we went to an early Christmas party, with  lots of other children and parents. A good time was had by all, and Santa even put in a pre-Christmas visit (question from a child to Santa: ‘why are you giving us presents now - aren’t you meant to come on Christmas Eve?’). But, after the party food had been devoured and the wine-glasses drained, a couple of (admittedly minor) instances stuck in my mind. The first involved the distribution of coloured bottles of soapy bubble mixture, and the second involved taking turns in the vegetable garden. 

In the first instance, the hostess of the party had thoughtfully laid in a store of bottles of bubble mixture with which the children - ranging in ages from 15 months to seven years - could amuse themselves. The mixture in each bottle was the same, the only difference was the colour of the plastic bottle that contained it, which were green, blue, red, purple and pink. Most of the parents had given their children the first bottle that came to hand out of the bag, although one had made a conscious effort to find a pink bottle for her ‘pink-obsessed’ daughter. We had given our girl a pink bottle because it was the nearest to hand, but shortly rescued it off her when it became apparent her still-developing fine motor skills meant that she couldn’t easily blow a bubble while simultaneously holding it. As she was content to chase the bubbles blown by others, we put the bottle back on the table for an older, more co-ordinated, child to enjoy. 

Shortly afterwards, such a child - a boy - appeared at the table looking for some bubble mixture of his very own. Unaware that there was a bag containing other bottles, we pointed out the pink bottle on the table and said he could have that one. Just as he reached out for it, one of the mothers (not his) actively prevented him from taking it, loudly asking where the bag was so that she could give the boy another bottle that wasn’t pink. At which point, a few other people, who had been milling around but until then hadn’t taken a blind bit of notice of the colour of the bottles, chimed in with jokey remarks such as ‘what were you thinking?’ (aimed at the boy) and ‘we can’t be having that’. They then took it upon themselves to help the woman find the boy a suitably masculine blue bottle of bubbles. It all happened in a low-key and light-hearted way, but nonetheless this minor incident can be considered an example of the shaming and policing of gender. 

The boy was three.

Afterwards, this incident got me thinking about other (also minor) instances that I’ve witnessed in the past weeks and months that also amount to gender policing. A boy who pushed my girl out of the way and was not reprimanded by his parent, who had clearly seen what happened. A girl being told to stand back from the slide at the playground, when a boy pushed in, to keep her ‘out of harm’s way.’ A boy being told not to cry, when he fell over and started wailing, clearly in some distress. A girl being praised for being cute. A boy being congratulated for ‘taking charge’. A girl admonished for being ‘bossy’. 

All of these instances are small. But small instances multiply. They may not amount to much in themselves, but constant repetition of such minor instances solidifies how children understand acceptable and unacceptable gender behaviour in a given place and time. That goes for both the children that such opprobrium or approval is directed at, and those who are merely bystanders. Pink-bubblegate wasn’t directed at my girl, for example, but being in the room when it occurred, she surely registered that something unusual was going on.

As my baby gets older, I am increasingly sensitised to the small moments that amount to bricks in the wall of stereotypically gendered behaviour. I acknowledge that we can’t escape gendered cultural scripts, and I am conscious that I don’t want to denigrate conventionally feminine things - hence giving her a pink bottle of bubbles in the first place, because pink is a colour just like any other with no intrinsic gender value (or so I keep telling myself through gritted teeth). This becomes even more important if we accept the findings of neuroscientists that nurture - i.e. what we learn - effectively becomes nature - i.e. what we are.  Neuroscientist Lise Eliot comments:

Think about language. Babies are born ready to absorb the sounds and grammar and intonation of any language, but then the brain wires itself up to only perceive and produce a specific language. After puberty, it's possible to learn another language, but it's far more difficult. I think of gender differences similarly: the ones that exist become amplified by the two different cultures that boys and girls are immersed in from birth. That contributes to the way their emotional and cognitive circuits get wired. (Eliot quoted in the Guardian)

To return to the scene of the family Christmas party and the second instance I mentioned. This one was also low-key and involved the children taking turns to run up and down a narrow piece of sacking in the middle of the vege garden (the strangest things seem to float their boats, huh?) After being told not to step in the actual vege patch, which contained newly-planted lettuces that would not benefit from the nurture of enthusiastic toddlers, the children - a boy and our girl - ran up to the opposite ends of the sacking and then started running towards each other, like cliched lovers in a romantic comedy ... or jumbo jets on a collision course. At some point, both children would meet in the middle with no room to pass. Would one of them yield or would mediation be required? 

I have to confess that my first impulse was to pull our girl out of the way and let the boy pass. A split-second later, my feminist consciousness kicked in and I checked myself. After all, I reasoned, why should it automatically be the girl who gives way? Wouldn’t that just be a brick in the wall of the idea that girls (and women) should defer to boys (and men)? Not to mention that it might also communicate to the boy that his will takes precedence over a girl’s. Instead, I chose not to intervene to see what the children did when they met in the middle. 

What I saw provided a salutary lesson.

Toe to toe, the children looked at each other, looked down at their feet, looked around at the sacking and the garden. Who, if anyone, would prevail? After thoughtful consideration, and without any discernible words, they then turned on their sides and passed each other back to back. They both remained on the sacking with only perhaps a couple of toes venturing into the garden, and the little lettuces remained intact. I felt proud of both of them for their equitable - and apparently telepathic - approach to problem-solving. It meant neither of them lost face, both got want they wanted, and neither was ‘forced’ to learn a lesson about gendered behaviour from an interfering adult (i.e. me!)

It also made me realise that unless I am conscious about the meaning of my actions then, all in all, I have the potential to be just another brick in the wall.