In the wake of the baby formula shortage, former founding editor of Gawker, Elizabeth Spiers, after arguing against her feelings and needs being secondary to her baby’s, indulges in fantasy.
This is misogyny, no matter where it comes from. No one demands that fathers damage their bodies to demonstrate decent parenting.
If we could imagine a world where men had to breastfeed their babies — learning how to do it, enduring the frustration of the baby not latching on and the pain of chapped and inflamed breasts and figuring out how to continue to do it despite long hours at work, little support, nowhere to pump and not enough sleep — the formula shortage there would not be so dire. In that alternative reality, it’s hard to imagine that the industry in the United States would be dominated by just a few companies. Instead, I expect that we’d see a multitude of formula start-ups blossoming in Silicon Valley. Formula would not be stigmatized because it’s a choice men would want to have available to them.
Her initial angst was caused by calls to breastfeed if formula was unavailable, a remarkably unhelpful and ignorant answer for myriad reasons. But Spiers wasn’t satisfied with going after Bette Midler or the editor of a Catholic magazine. What about men?
This is a perpetual indulgence in argumentation, the comparison of things that can never be disproven with difficult realities. If women ruled everything, there would be no war, no crime, no poverty, no hunger and we would all love each other. If men could get pregnant, abortions would be readily available, free and safe. If men gave birth, they would get paid parental leave for a year. Variations on this theme are “what would Jesus do”” or “what would Martin Luther King do.?”
But, of course, men cannot breastfeed because biology, for better or worse, has dictated otherwise. Maybe she’s right. Maybe not. But it will never be known because it’s impossible, and therefore can never be proven wrong. Nonetheless, that she’s a woman and rightfully disputes the argument renders it “misogyny, no matter where it comes from,” the latter qualification added because it often comes from other women. Apparently, women who disagree with Spiers are self-loathing misogynists, and Spiers sees nothing narcissistic about it.
Of course, “fathers,” by which she means men who don’t have to endure the vicissitudes of biology, have occasionally had their bodies damaged in war over the course of history. There is a fairly strong probability that this, too, was a product of biology, even if it didn’t inure to men’s advantage.
Despite Spier’s many rationalizations, one immutable fact remains, that females are capable of breastfeeding and men are not. The relative merits of breastfeeding are a fair subject of debate, about which there are reasonable argument for and against. One argument against is that it impairs a woman’s ability to find fulfillment by enjoying her full role in social and economic life. If that’s her choice, so be it.
But choosing career over motherhood means something has to give. I don’t envy women their options, and I don’t judge their choice in this regard. It’s entirely reasonable to choose career over motherhood, even if it’s not the choice you would make and might conflict with our biological imperative to procreate to perpetuate the species.
And yet, this isn’t men’s fault, and it doesn’t become men’s fault because some women can’t get what they want at any given moment in time. Where were the calls for reduced regulation and tariffs on imports of baby formula before the shortage? If there were more manufacturers, how would they stay in business producing excess formula that wouldn’t be purchased because it was unnecessary?
It’s not until there’s a shortage that a problem exists, after which someone like Spiers indulges in her fantasy argument about how everything would be different if men had to suffer. It’s bad enough that someone of putative intelligence and credibility proffers such an insipid argument. It’s bad enough that a newspaper of some note publishes it. But it’s too much when the mere fact that women are affected because of biology, not any malevolent act of man, gives rise to the constant delusion of misogyny.
As a man, I’m sorry that I can’t breastfeed. I fed both my children with expressed milk and loved doing so. But biology is real, and it serves no one’s interest in denying that this is the way breasts work. Resorting to sexism by fantasy comparisons is a nonsensical argument. No, it can never be proven wrong. No, it fixes nothing.
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