You don’t have to be Freud to recognize that someone who dubs herself The Alpha Parent, and doesn’t have her tongue firmly implanted in her cheek, has self-esteem issues. And we’re all quite familiar with the sanctimoniousness of lactivists. But even I have to admit to surprise at the brutal, toxic and abusive nature of Allison Dixley’s new book Breast Intentions; How women sabotage breastfeeding for themselves and others.
I can’t say I wasn’t warned. On her Facebook page, Dixley heralded the publication of the book with this:
Forget pussy-footing around “feelings.” Get some of this in your eyeballs. My new book Breast Intentions, available worldwide on Tuesday!”
I bought it, laid my eyeballs on it, and quite honestly was filled with … glee. As so often happens, no one does a better job at destroying the credibility of lactivists and exposing their true agenda than lactivists themselves. Dixley has staked her breasts as the two hills she’s willing to die on and no one could be happier than me.
The publisher, Pinter and Martin, has helpfully posted the full introduction to the book on line, so everyone can understand that Breast Intentions is a cri de coeur, trumpeting Dixley’s conviction that women who don’t breastfeed their infants should be consigned to a living hell of soul sucking guilt. Every page of the book, including the introduction oozes with contempt.
It starts on the very first page, in only the second paragraph:
Many women having babies today were formula-fed as infants. And the world around them is dominated by perceptions of infant feeding that can only be described as regressive: as a species, we have moved from the uncostly, self-regulating and environmentally friendly breast to the unquenchable industrial teat – a capitalist’s dream.
And Dixley knows just whom to blame: mothers!
The argument that individual women aren’t responsible for their failure to breastfeed appears plausible, comprehensible and consistent with the timeless and persistent world-view of women as the weaker sex…
Yet this response to a normal bodily function is needlessly reactive and awkwardly paternal. A blame-free breastfeeding culture infantilises women, framing them not as active agents capable of controlling their destiny and achieving their goals, but as passive wallflowers at the mercy of forces they are powerless to defy.
Dixley comes across like a nightmare version of a mother-in-law. Sure she’s blaming you for your failure as a mother, but it’s for your own good! She’s not going to “infantalize” you by demonstrating any of those sissy virtues like compassion and understanding.
Sociological theories would have us believe the answer lies in factors beyond the mother’s control – fetishism of the breast, formula-company advertising, vague notions of ‘lack of support’ and ‘a disabling social environment’ – in other words, we are led to believe that individual mothers are not responsible for the outcome of their attempts at breastfeeding. This assumption is defeatist and disempowering.
At times, Dixley’s prose reads like parody:
‘Social support’ is the buzzword of this apologetic era and dominates breastfeeding discourse. Yet social support is a broad umbrella term that can be conceptualised in so many different ways that it becomes redundant as a definition. Even so the term persists, hanging around like a fart trapped in an elevator. And, like a fart, the ‘support’ rhetoric functions as a comforting if elusive scapegoat, nifty at deflecting attention from other salient issues …
Dixley makes it clear that she is not one of those wishy-washy lactivists who euphemize their condemnation of women who can’t or won’t breastfeed as “support.” Their support reeks like a fart in an elevator. Dixley believes that what is needed is exhortations laced with casual cruelty, because the goal ought not to be to understand women who can’t or don’t wish to breastfeed, but rather to condemn them in the most vicious possible terms.
Dixley does use humor, though inadvertent:
The philosopher Nietzsche warned that we are most clueless about what is closest to us… Emotions drive our behaviour, yet we have a relatively ignorant understanding of them. If we want more women to choose breastfeeding in the ‘real world’, then we need to understand more about ‘real women’ – that is, women influenced by emotion.
You don’t say, Allison!
Neitzche also said:
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
But introspection is the last thing on Dixley’s mind (obviously!).
In Breast Intentions you may read things you would prefer not to. Indeed, there is a darker, more malignant side to the breast vs formula debate, particularly concerning women’s relationships with each other. This book exposes the unforgiving and angry constituents of the maternal character, revealing a mother’s capacity to deprave as well as to nurture. In exploring the mechanics involved in deception, guilt, envy, contempt, defensiveness and sabotage, the book penetrates emotions that often feel too ugly or too unacceptable to talk about, particularly in such a feminine domain. Yet this dark and opaque side of motherhood is one we leave untreated at our peril.
I agree, Allison.
Your deception, envy, contempt and defensiveness positively “reek” from every sentence that you write. And believe me when I say that I don’t view YOUR feelings as too ugly or unacceptable to talk about in a feminine domain. Indeed, I believe that the ugly emotions that you display, and the casual cruelty that hides your fundamental insecurity, are precisely what we SHOULD be talking about when we talk about contemporary breastfeeding advocacy.
Let me emphasize that I speak about your viciousness from the perspective of someone who breastfed four children until they weaned themselves, and I enjoyed it. But just because I did it doesn’t make me a better mother than anyone else who loves her children with her whole heart, indeed her entire being, as most women do. And that means it doesn’t make you a better mother, either, no matter how desperately you cling to that fiction.
Breast Intentions is breathtakingly, relentlessly vicious because Allison Dixley is breathtakingly, relentlessly vicious. She is the poster girl for everything that is wrong with professional lactivism, and I couldn’t be more delighted.
This year the holidays came early to The Skeptical OB; I suspect that Breast Intentions is the gift that will keep on giving.
