Once again, the natural parenting crowd rushes to demonstrate what I’ve written. This time they’re demonstrating how cultural constructions of both women and nature are used to promote the misogynist belief that mothers ought to suffer.
Both professional lactivist Dr. Jack Newman and artist Natalie Lennard have expropriated the Virgin Mary to make their sexist points. That’s not surprising. Religion is one of the most powerful sources for culturally constructed views about women, nature and the “need” for suffering. That’s why it has been traditionally used to keep women in their place.
You know what else was never seen in nature? Men mainsplainin’ breastfeeding to women and profiting from it.
This is hardly the first time that the Virgin Mary has been used in this way. Indeed, La Leche League was created explicitly in order to convince women to breastfeed so they wouldn’t go to work. It is named for a statue of Mary nursing Jesus, Nuestra Senora de la Leche.
In the book La Leche League: At the Crossroads of Medicine, Feminism, and Religion, Jule DeJager Ward explains that the La Leche League was:
…founded in 1956 by a group of Catholic mothers who sought to mediate in a comprehensive way between the family and the world of modern technological medicine…
The League’s presentations and literature carry a strong suggestion that breast feeding is obligatory. Their message is simple: Nature intended mothers to nurse their babies; therefore, mothers ought to nurse…
Emulating the tradition of using religion to convince mothers they must suffer, Dr. Jack Newman offers this bit of idiocy:
I have many photos of paintings of mothers breastfeeding. Not one of them shows a nipple shield. At our clinic one day last week, 5 out 16 of the mothers were using a nipple shield. I am appalled. There is nothing that can be done with a nipple shield that cannot be done better by a skilled helper without one …
Wait a minute while I pick myself up off the floor and catch my breath from laughing so hard.
Jack Newman has never seen a painting of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding with a nipple shield and he therefore concludes that nipple shields are never needed? Seriously? We’re supposed to believe that a woman who had a virgin birth is a perfect role model for human physiology?
You know what else was never seen in nature? Men mainsplainin’ breastfeeding to women and profiting from it. The very idea would have horrified Mary and her contemporaries. Women helped other women learn to breastfeed, no money exchanged and men had absolutely nothing to do with it. If Jack Newman thinks nipple shields are not necessary because they weren’t used in the Middle Ages, then he ought to be horrified by the notion that he is making money browbeating women into breastfeeding. There is absolutely nothing natural about what he does and he ought to stop immediately.
There was no internet, no Facebook, no books, no blogs and no videos in nature, either. Why does Dr. Newman finds it perfectly appropriate to use technology to profit from breastfeeding — something that never occurred in the entire history of the human race — yet is horrified by the idea of using technology to help women reduce pain in breastfeeding? It’s obvious: good mothers are supposed to suffer and Dr. Newman, a man, considers himself an appropriate arbiter of just how much suffering is required.
Natalie Lennard tries to make the same nonsensical point with her artwork, The Creation of Man. Apparently Lennard has used Photoshop to create a composite of a woman giving birth in the natural childbirth approved manner and an old painting of the birth of Jesus. Lennard fancies herself transgressive when she is nothing more than another gullible woman credulously quoting the charlatan Ina May Gaskin:
“The human species is no more unsuited to give birth than any other of the 5000 species of mammals on the planet. The birth-giving woman is the central agent in the ancient drama of bringing forth new life”. – Ina May
Every year we celebrate a natural birth, a story that takes place in the most primitive surroundings. Mary, giving birth to the Son of God in a stable … Yet how is it that beyond Julius Garibaldi’s 1891 painting of Mary and Joseph slumped in raw exhaustion, we have never seen a ‘real’ depiction of birth biology, particularly of Mary in upright, ecstatic primal instinct that such an environment would have helped facilitate?
Risking controversy to use universal characters to portray the ultimate ‘birth undisturbed’ amongst other mammals in a dim and lowly environment, suggests to modern woman that often in birth, less is more…
Ecstatic primal instinct? No one in Mary’s time thought birth was ecstatic. That’s a conceit created by Western, white women who have easy access to medical care and who pretend to themselves that they are oh so impressive for refusing it. Once again we are supposed to believe that a woman who had a virgin birth is an appropriate model for human physiology.
Back in Mary’s time there were no women artists, no Photoshop and no internet. If Lennard believes that women should give birth the way that she imagines Mary did, why doesn’t she live the rest of her life the way that Mary did?
Obviously, the invocation of Mary by Dr. Newman and Ms. Lennard is absurd in the extreme, but the purpose behind it is as ancient as the Bible; the purpose is to control women. It’s all about convincing women that suffering is the lot of women in general and necessary for mothering in particular. There’s a bitter irony to portraying nature as the touchstone for how much women ought to suffer, yet discarding it to use technological means to convince women to suffer naturally.
These efforts aren’t just ironic; they’re ludicrous. If you’re using the Virgin Mary to make your point about the physiology of mothering, you need to re-evaluate your point.
