An Impassioned Defense of the Status Quo

So, Hanna Rosin makes the incredibly bold suggestion in the Atlantic this month that breastfeeding is not all its cracked up to be! Did you know that it's difficult and inconvenient to breastfeed when you are trying to hold down a full-time job away from your baby? Did you know that it's awkward to breastfeed in public in a culture where acknowledging the function of women's breasts as a food source makes people nervous? Did you know that babies wake up often in the night and demand to eat and that their fathers can only provide them with liquid nourishment if it's in a bottle? Well, that's why we have groundbreaking publications like the Atlantic and insightful writers like Rosin to tell us what we couldn't possibly figure out for ourselves!

Rosin gathers together all her anti-breastfeeding insights and makes the logical leap to an incredible conclusion: if our society doesn't value breastfeeding, it is clearly breastfeeding that's the problem! And when only 1 out of 10 babies is exclusively breastfed until six months, the recommendation of WHO, AAP, and the US HHS, it is quite obvious that breastfeeding is becoming far too popular in the US, and someone needs to speak out against the Gathering Storm that is mothers feeding babies in the way that mammals have done for millions of years. Rosin then spends some late nights at her computer and concludes in contrast to decades of research and thousands of studies that the health benefits of breastfeeding for children are not as stupendous as she thought they would be (and she's a trained research scientist who understands statistical significance and what a preponderance of evidence in epidemiology and nutrition might look like! Oh, that's right, she's nothing of the sort).

So, there are plenty of avenues to criticize Rosin from, but I'll just focus on one. Here is a woman who is arguably in one of the most privileged demographic slices of the US in 2009. She's white, well-educated, a reporter for many of the nation's most influential publications (the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Republic) married to an equally privileged husband (David Plotz, editor of Slate where Rosin has a blog.) And we can probably safely guess she's part of a household with an income far above the national median. She has three children, all of whom she has been able to breastfeed because she's had the economic and social resources needed to do it. She combined her career with breastfeeding, and whether that was because of a workplace that allowed her to pump or a flexible schedule or working from home or maternity leave or being supported by her spouse, who knows. Like many upper-middle class women, it worked out for her. But, it still wasn't particularly easy: Pumping at work is at best a pain. Waking up at night to feed a baby if you need to work in the morning can be exhausting and soul-sucking. Not all husbands take up the slack when you take on the admittedly major project of feeding another human from your body (and it sounds like Plotz wasn't quite up to the job.)

So, does Rosin, from her position of privilege think to herself: Even with all the advantages I have, breastfeeding is actually really taxing. How could I help women who don't have all these advantages and make it easier for them to exercise this basic physiological function that every human baby comes into the world expecting from its mother? What could I do as a reporter with access to some of most influential media outlets to improve the lives of mothers and babies in the US? How could I illuminate the many barriers that prevent American mothers from providing their babies with human milk --- lack of maternity leave paid or otherwise, lack of health care, lack of family-friendly work policies, lack of legal protection for breastfeeding (or pumping) mothers in public or the workplace?

Nope, luckily for everyone, Rosin decides to focus on the real problem in this country: upper middle class women like herself condemning other upper middle class women like herself to hours of mind-racking guilt about whether they managed to breastfeed their babies. Whew, close one there! Let's not lose sleep over the 1 in 5 children under the age of 6 living in poverty in this country many of whom could use a boost of five IQ points in order to overcome all the other disadvantages they start off life with. Let's worry about the tiny percentage of extremely privileged adult women in this country whose feelings are hurt when someone criticizes them (possibly unfairly) for not having breastfed. Hurt feelings are a wonderful basis on which to catalyze public health policy that would benefit the fewest and most powerful at the expense of the least powerful many. Once again, it looks like we can count on our media elite to spend their time and passion defending unjust privileges, i.e. defending the status quo for the wealthier members of society.

Rosin, of course, is not the first woman (or man) to do this. In fact, as we've seen certainly for the last couple decades (and probably longer), women and family issues only merit interest in the mainstream media as cat fights between upper middle class women at the playground aka the Mommy Wars? Read the New York Times style section lately? The Atlantic itself is notable for giving Caitlin Flanagan's ravings a platform. And who could forget "Dan Quayle was Right"?

When women and family issues are presented as being solely about whether individual moms feel guilty about their choices, there is no reason for them to be taken seriously by the people---still mostly men---who have the power to change the set of options women have to choose between. It also distracts the very women who have the resources to push for changes to laws and allocation of government resources (yep, we're still looking at you, Rosin!) away from addressing the real problems at hand (e.g. the lack of any mandatory paid maternity leave in the US). Instead, it encourages them to spend time worrying about something as absolutely unimportant as whether some women condemn other women's choices.

(As an aside, why is breastfeeding lumped in with the other choices that the moms in Rosin's demographic niche spend a fair amount of time worrying about anyway---cloth vs. disposable diapers, cosleeping vs. cry-it-out, montessori vs. waldorf preschool, etc. etc.? Characterizing the normal physiological process that baby humans start life with as a "choice" makes me wonder when we’re all going to be hooked up to dialysis machines and IVs at work to make us more efficient employees. We’ve got the choice to pee and eat but not everyone wants to exercise it because they value their career goals more!)

Ultimately, this trivialization is the real harm of Rosin's article. If you can dismiss breast-feeding and infant care as something that does not really need to be done by mothers---a silly optional whim with limited benefits in which the lucky few can indulge---then why should we as a society ever make it a priority to provide the maternity leave necessary to making breastfeeding a realistic option for the majority of mothers? Why should we have any laws mandating accommodation of breast-feeding mothers and their babies? Why should we make it easy for parents to continue to pursue their career goals after or while taking time out to care for small children?

And so, Rosin's perversely myopic perspective from inside her socioeconomic cocoon ends up simply reinforcing the depressing truth behind the status quo in the US mentioned above which is that only 10% of babies are lucky enough to be exclusively breast-fed until six months old. It is beyond me why the Atlantic would think it necessary to publish Rosin's case against breast-feeding when, quite obviously, for the majority of moms and babies, the case against it is being made convincingly every day.

How Green Was My McMansion

A recent story on NPR on a power company installing solar panels on its customers' homes and businesses was presumably intended as a glimpse of one utility's novel approach to cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions. The story began, however, with the most disturbing of anecdotes:

"When Sean Durkin built a 4,000-square-foot house in Charlotte, N.C., he wanted to install solar panels. But he gave up when he learned that it would cost about $40,000.

"We'd love to have the panels — if we could afford it — and be completely green," Durkin says. But given that his utility bill is only about $200 a month, he says "it made no sense."

Then he heard that his local electric company, Duke Energy, wants to install solar panels on hundreds of customers' roofs and vacant lots.

"If Duke could put them up and they're going to get a better deal with it, then at least I'm helping the cause, and that's what I wanted to do," Durkin says."

Yes, Sean Durkin apparently thinks he could be "helping the cause" if only he could afford solar panels on his 4000 square foot house. 4000 square feet!

Ok, clearly I could just end this post right there at the point where I snarfed out my coffee in disbelief upon hearing this tale of woe because what else do you need to know, right? There's been only about a majillion electrons spilled on the topic of green housing and grotesque overconsumption and general insanity that's been powering the US housing bubble. Nonetheless, I, as your intrepid blogger, will forge on because clearly Elizabeth Shogren, the reporter on this piece, and her editors at NPR did not feel the need to point out that if only Durkin had a teensy bit of sense, he'd be doing a hell of a lot more for The Cause if he'd built a reasonably sized home (and maybe would have had a bit of cash leftover to buy some solar panels himself.)

In fact, the US used to be a land of reasonably sized, though frankly still pretty darn large, homes. In 1970, the median new house in the US was 1385 sq feet, with a quarter of new homes still under 1200 sq feet in 1973. But by 2006, it was up to 2248, with 24 % over 3000 sq feet and only 4% under 1200. At the same time, the number of people per household, however, is dropping, down to 2.59 in 2000.

So, first of all, the per household consumption of energy for a 4000 sq foot house is 155.2 million BTU; for a home with between 1000-1500 sq feet, only 75.4, and for the range that the median new home falls in, 106.8. In other words, Durkin's house is consuming 45% more energy than the median new home and more than double that of a very reasonable living space of 1000-1500 sq feet. On top of that, a not-so-well insulated 1500 sq foot house is still better than a very well-insulated 3000 sq foot house. (And of course, an apartment in a multi-unit building is an even bigger winner: 60.2K BTU for a three+ bedroom apartment vs. 101.2K BTU for a three bedroom freestanding house.)

Sure, you say, but what crazy people could live as a family in a 1000 sq foot? Well, actually in Japan, the average home is about 1,020 sq feet, about the same as in Europe. Nonetheless, Europe, Japan, and the US all have roughly similar number of people per household, ranging from 2.1 to 3.1. In the US, though, even the median home size is a bloated 1795 sq feet.

And our gigundic houses correlate closely with our gigundic energy appetite, with the US per capita energy consumption, almost twice that of Japan and Germany. Our productivity doesn't quite make up for it either with US energy intensity (i.e. energy consumption per dollar of gross domestic product) exceeding theirs as well, 9113 BTU/$ for the US vs. 7021 for Germany, and 6539 for Japan.

When it comes down to it then, both Sean Durkin and NPR missed the point, stated quite nicely by Matthew Yglesias today:

"If you look at how people live in the United States, the real green individual is the poor person who lives in a small apartment, rides the bus to work, and consumes beef relatively sparingly. That guy’s environmental footprint is probably smaller in most ways than that of a prosperous person who goes out of his way to consume green products. [...] “to go green” on a social level would probably look very different from what an individual upper middle-class environmentally minded consumer’s personal efforts to do so look like."

Hating on David Brooks

Welcome to Valedictocracy, a cozy little blog where we unleash our inner know-it-alls on all that is irritating, misguided, and just plain dumb.

And, of course, there's nothing more irritating than David Brook's armchair (or salad bar) sociological categories: the bourgeois bohemians, the organization kids, patio man, and now the valedictocrats, all of which are imaginary creatures with no greater basis in the here and now than unicorns, hobbits, or moderate Republicans.

Nonetheless, like Brooks, I, for one, welcome our new Achievatron overlords. And, being a cautious, washed-up valedictorian myself, rather than being the change I want to see, in this blog I will merely criticize the foolishness I love to hate!

Stay tuned for more overeducated pontificating coming your way shortly...