This was originally a Twitter thread, but with the death of Twitter and its slow zombification into an Ayn Rand Hellscape, the thread no longer exists. I wrote it in July of 2018 (and have lightly edited it for clarity in 2024).
Usually when people write connections like that, we’re talking conspiracy theories. But nope, this is just corporate evil and exploitation in the name of profit.
Trigger Warning: A thread on the commodification and conscription of women’s bodies. You’ve been warned. Exploring relationships between childbearing, work, coercive control, breast feeding, formula, gig economies, capitalist exploitation, colonialism and colonialist paternalism…
In this week’s culture war, the Leche Paratroopers have attacked the Working Parents Brigade. I’m making my stand: I’m Team #FeedBabies I will not cede ground to either side. I posit that both sides are oppressive. Formula is an undeniable good for economic and social justice.
Personal experience: I’d be dead without formula. Smother was a shitty parent, way too young, had a massive staph infection (or something) at my birth. (She’s been known to exaggerate.) My gran and great-gran were my primary caretakers, and both were well into menopause (thanks to routine hysterectomies)
There were no wet nurses in 1970s Indiana, thank the gods and angels.May that vile form of human exploitation never return. Formula existed. I got a healthy microbiome from fingers in my mouth and kisses and dirt and sharing biscuits with the dog. (Pro tip: the tiny white Milkbones in the 70s small dog multicolored assortment taste better than baby teething cookies from the same period and almost like animal crackers, but less sweet. I loved my teacup poodle brother. He socialized me.)
In fact, perhaps I’ve a healthier microbiome than my full siblings, who were both breastfed (for reasons.) Both have Smother’s full devastating and significant digestive, reproductive and metabolic disorders; I have almost none. Maybe mitosis, maybe acquired. Can’t know.
I know Nestle was awful in the 70s. They’ve remained awful. They’re profiting off Flint’s lead water. You needn’t tell me they’re evil and have been evil. Yet, I will still defend sending baby milk and water to Ethiopia and Eritrea in the early 80s. Starving moms don’t make milk.
Food aid was being stolen and between drought and heat and fucking warlords, there weren’t many options for the people on the ground. A dehydrated mom can’t make milk. Granny caring for baby after mom got kidnapped also can’t make milk. Breast is only best when Mom is a person with agency and nutrition and water and safety.
Formula offers a slim chance of survival for mom and baby when both are starving. And yes, Nestle did send water. That’s HOW Big Water went big.
You didn’t think it manufactured itself for Yuppies, did you? Perrier and Evian were legacies of 18th and 19th century water cures.
Nope, crisis water is a thing; More so the tech to make the bottles. (Fuck you, too, Dupont.) Marketing it was Nestle’s evil genius.
My big issue with Leche Paratroopers is how paternalistic their Only Breast schtick is. Oh, those foolish brown women were totally taken in by that big nasty corporation and forty years later are still completely stupid and have learned nothing and must be protected from themselves.
Read that back. Read how awful that sounds. It denies agency to all of those women who were making rational economic decisions based on their knowledge and circumstances. They had incomplete information coming from self-serving sources.
Guess what? I’m a reasonably wealthy white woman with a doctorate in the sciences and I make rational decisions with incomplete information from flawed sources every single day. That’s agency. It’s power. All women have a right to her own decisions. Especially poor brown ones.
Yes, Nestle exploited women and children for profit. Let me introduce you to Facebook, the two hundred thousand existing multilevel marketing schemes, all of the antivax movement, Wellness Mama, the avocado wolf guy, Baby Einstein, lead paint, the leaded gasoline industry, fast food, fast fashion, Big Tobacco, King Sugar, Agribusiness, and cereal processing.
There is not an industry in the world that doesn’t exploit for profit.
Note well that the UN is not calling on Facebook to shut down the antivax ad revenue for the Mommy blog mafia even though that is objectively more harmful to the entire planet and much easier to control. Take out 80% of the delivery system (Facebook, instagram, ad revenue) and antivax falls apart.
But agency is fine when it’s women with internet connections telling lies, right? Sharing lies about pizza places and daycare centers performing rituals in their non-existent basements? Of course people are free to lie when it advantages them.
Speaking of exploitative relationships, let us not forget the hellish collaboration of the anti-choice, anti-contraception, anti-suffrage religious right and breast-feeding advocacy. Catholic and Evangelical sources are founders and funders.
Founding Mothers – La Leche League – The Lives They Lived – Obituaries
The stay-at-home feminists of La Leche league.
Most local breastfeeding advocacy organizations rely on evangelical or Catholic churches for space and volunteers. They choose to not piss off the hand that feeds them. Better talk up anti-contraception. Advocate for white collar pumping rooms, not comprehensive paid parental leave. Better condemn gay men with babies since making it extremely difficult to feed babies EXCEPT at breast means gay men have no chance of adopting or having surrogate children. (Here’s where we watch the TERFs gloat themselves into a stroke.) Widowers who lose their wives in childbirth will be fucked. Maybe lose their baby, too.
Women who need medication, whether for HIV, TB, psych meds, insulin, Crohn’s, whatever, will be discouraged from having children at all because breastfeeding and meds are a bad idea —
Hi, Eugenics. Haven’t seen you in a while.
Breastfeeding only also discourages all women from working during their 20s and 30s. It incentivizes not promoting women, leaving them in dead-end careers before their careers even start. Hardcore breastfeeding advocacy is Kinder Kirche Kuchen, updated with some crunchy granola crossed with tradwife veneer.
It says women should focus on babies, to the exclusion of their own ambitions/talents and glory in their biological determinism. This worldview grudgingly allows AFAB if they keep their ovaries and don’t overdo T. It treats transmasc like a costume, so they’re not trans allies.
But making formula rare won’t stop ambitious, wealthy, powerful women. It never has. Forcing a ‘Breast Only’ world only creates opportunities for exploitation. Wetnurses. In the US, it’s milk banks; breast milk’s an expensive commodity right now. There’s a ton of profit to be had.
You know who’s watching? Nestle. Silicon Valley. Monsanto. Medical device manufacturers. Pharma. Plastics. Venture Capital.
The new world of wet-nursing probably won’t be rent a woman to live in your house. Though since the religious right sees The Handmaid’s Tale as instruction manual, being rented might be optimistic.
Instead, think… industrial dairy farm.
Except Uberized. Gig economy.
Sign up for your free pump! Fill 50 ounces a day, get a bonus. Buy your groceries through our company store (so we can ensure you’re not eating Cheetos you junk food whore)! Pass our complimentary urine screen and go up a tier! Best Pay ONLY! (Some skin colors need not apply.)
The human cow makes an extra $30 a day; the buyers spend an extra $10 per bottle for all vegan (uh, about that…) organic certified breast milk with guaranteed antibodies and no diseases. (Also, about that…) Blue Nipple rakes in profit and Peter Thiel buys more blood slaves.
I swear on a stack of IUDs that I am not exaggerating how badly this can go.
When wetnurses were common, women couldn’t afford to feed themselves had to let their babies starve. They were paid in room, board and pocket change to feed wealthy babies. Women whose babies died of diarrhea or diphtheria sold their milk while weeping the loss of their dead child.
Milk supply expands to fit needs, but not indefinitely, nor perfectly. A woman with a 6 mo old hired to feed a 2 week old isn’t providing either kid with what they need. Is it better than nothing? Sure, but so is calcium fortified lactose water with vitamin supplements and fats and proteins.
But the Marissa Mayers and Kim Kardashians of the world don’t want a crying, grieving poor person in their house. No, much better if the milk comes in anonymous, cute-kawaii!! insulated boxes, delivered by sexy young men in clean, new cars. Blue Nipple. Promo code LECHE!
But… The woman with the pump who is supplying Blue Nipple for an extra $30 a day? Where’s her baby? What’s her baby eating? Is her baby thriving?
In the age of wetnurses, the aristocracy literally looked down on the peasantry. Aristocrats grew taller and stronger. Malnutrition deprives a body of mass. And cognition. Malnourish a baby and learning disabilities and conduct disorders skyrocket.
Hey, Brave New World readers: Here’s your Deltas and Epsilions. No cloning or decanting needed.
Am I talking about America? Sure. But also Singapore. Dubai. Buenos Aires. Beijing. Johannesburg. Riyadh. Delhi. Moscow. Anywhere with an urban elite, where major income inequality allows for the exploitation of an underclass.
Make formula impossible and women lose the ability to self-determine their lives. Babymilk, contraception, running clean water. and the washing machine are foundations of women’s suffrage and liberation. Take any of them away and the cracks start to show.
I mentioned contraception. Yeah, hormonal contraception can interfere with milk production, requiring supplemental formula. You know what else interferes with milk production?
Pregnancy.
Leche Paratroopers hate to admit it, but lactation is NOT contraception except the way all babies are contraception. Ovulation may cease, but exhaustion stops ovulation, too. Which exclusive, on-demand breastfeeding causes. Plus, birth is injury. Everyone’s tired, half the partnership is sitting on ice packs, nobody’s having sex.
At best, it lasts 6 months. 3 months of healing, 3 months of fatigue Calling lactational amenorrhea contraception is functional bullshit, because it is unreliable, especially in the last month, when you may have ovulated but don’t know it yet.
And two kids in diapers SUCKS exponentially more than one kid in diapers.
Please, let me introduce you to Mormon and Catholic families with 8 kids in 9 years of marriage. They used LAM, too. Talk to dentists about what eight pregnancies do to a set of healthy teeth. Then think about her spine. Her ankles and knees. Her soft tissue. Does a walking uterus actually need legs?
But if wealthier women (those who can live on one salary) who can’t work anyway, or get to work in some magnanimous faux-egalitarian home business like consulting or selling little bits to other moms stuck at home — since they’re doing childcare anyway and blitzed their career — what’s egalitarian about that? Why should the man respect her right to refuse sex when she says she’s too tired or sore? She was just hanging out at home. He’s supporting her. So what if she gets pregnant? Another kid doesn’t cost much more. Reusable diapers and breastfeeding.
I’m not talking about the 18th century. I just described the 1950s in the US in the white suburbs. Marital rape. Financial coercive control and abuse. This is within living memory.
Pray for that washing machine. It’s the last holdout here.
If you aren’t sick to your stomach at the thought of being FORCED to give up your agency to breastfeed… okay, here’s the obverse: if we make formula expensive and rare because we’ve killed global demand for it, we can force women to breastfeed.
Just not their own children. Remember, Blue Nipple needs producers. A lactating woman is a necessary resource. You know, we know how to make people lactate. It’s not that hard. A few hormones and some stimulation. Easier if they’re already doing it, but we can force it.
The hot growth sector in private prisons today is women’s prisons. Most inmates are young women, childbearing age, 18-40. Their diets can be well controlled. Let’s give them some time off their sentence if human dairy is the job they pick. Until it becomes a requirement.
Now let’s give the cops an incentive to arrest more young women between 18 and 40. Hey, the ones protesting for their right to work and determine their own health care! Give ‘em a felony and five years as a milk machine. They’ll never work again. Problem fucking solved.
Have an approved kid and your felony is expunged, except not really. You’ll never work again thanks to that long employment gap. So sell some leggings. Or makeup. Recruit your neighbors and Facebook friends for bonuses.
Hey, have you heard about Blue Nipple’s free breast pump? See how this works?
And if we’re okay with milking humans, why not let them serve their sentences as incubators? The adoption and trafficking market can’t survive on stolen Guatemalan kids forever. Lots of (white) extra frozen embryos that need to be plugged into a uterus before their cryro facility has a power cut. It’s not like those girls in prison were doing anything with their uteruses anyway. It’s not like they care about their kids, or they wouldn’t be in prison.
What about kidney donors? Liver lobe donors? Heart donors? Let’s quit using that expensive machine dialysis and hook the male prisoners up to famous violinists and CEOs. Gender parity, after all.
This is a very steep slope made of ice and ICE and coconut oil and teflon ball bearings. It’s so slippery that it’s already happening. The organ trade is all over refugee camps, China and SE Asia. (See: The Red Market, Scott Carney)
Surrogate wombs – Indian women in Nepal and Bangladesh (Radiolab, Birthstory, Jun 7 2018) The baby trade in US – international and regional adoptions. The public foster to private adoption agency pipeline. Plasma. Milk banks. Uncompensated prison labor for private profit.
The Religious Right already teams up with the aspirational motherhood lifestyle influencers to promote a vision that says women who can’t or can’t afford to breastfeed are failures. (See: Mormon Mommy Blogging as career.)
This is the embodiment of the idea that women’s only worth is in their uterus and their breast. That the idea of a career is a distant second to being mommy. That we don’t need to be educated. That we should be forever at home until our fathers choose for us. Covered. Hidden.
Making people commodities starts with one act. I can’t pay for passage to Virginia colony, but I promise to work it off. The captain sells my bill to a farmer. Who cheats me on my pay, but eventually, even as innumerate as I am, I get free. That’s indenture. Slavery for time.
My brother is captured in a local war. I’m traded for my brother and cousin. I’m the new lord’s fourth wife. My job is to feed the babies of his favored wives. He trades away my one surviving girl. Politics. I die young, my bones depleted by two continuous decades of lactation.
Or a girl is captured in a local war. The conquering warlord sells her to a third lord as booty. That’s life slavery. She has a baby in captivity. That baby is saleable, too. That’s chattel slavery. It’s that simple.
I can’t afford to feed my kids, but my pretty eldest daughter is strong. The merc army needs cooks, nurses. Men deserve to fuck before they die in war. I’ll get enough for her to feed the others. If she survives the war, she’ll have skills. If I don’t sell her, we all die anyway
This is how slavery starts. With seeing a person as a product or merely a conduit for a product. When the Leche Paratroopers say breast is best, they are also saying the woman is less important than the child. That other people have a claim on her body no matter her consent.
Don’t say having a baby is her choice. Pregnancy isn’t always voluntary. Avoiding pregnancy isn’t free and requires medical help. Circumstances at conception may favor being a breast-feeding stay at home mom, but 40 weeks is a long time. Conditions change. Children aren’t punishments.
Now the obverse: formula also oppresses women and children.
I said I’m not ceding ground to either side. I am Team Everybody Eats. Also team Everybody gets a say.
Specifically in our form of fake gender-blind capitalism. When we offer no parental leave, we force poor women to either rely on social support and savings and their partner after giving birth and during infancy, or they go back to work. Too soon. Baby goes to daycare.
Don’t get me wrong – daycare is the BEST thing there is for socializing small human beings. Kids should be in crèches for 4-6 hours a day from the time they can crawl. Humans are social animals and need to be around others at the same developmental level regularly.
Locking toddlers and one parent in the suburbs with no interaction except each other stunts children’s emotional development and isolates their parents. Who then get fucking squirrelly as all hell. See above, antivax, aspirational lifestyle. Note that the US center of this shit – Utah- has the highest use of benzos, anxiolytics, antidepressants, and women’s suicide attempts per capita in the world.
I LOVE Daycare. I want ALL kids in good daycare. I want all daycare workers rightly and well paid for their tough and demanding job. I want to see private nannies who are one of the most exploited classes of workers become a rarity. I want people to really recognize that daycare and public school prevents child abuse.
69.
But that’s not what we’re doing. Too many people are working for daycare. It costs more to put a kid in daycare where I live than out of state tuition at the local top shelf public university.
And unlike your kid’s college, you can’t finance daycare with your or their future earnings. You gotta pay every month, usually when your career and budget don’t have much wiggle room.
I know white, educated nannies who made more than my grad students and I paid as well as I was allowed. (I flatter myself that we had better hours and conditions; no poop, no vomit, tantrums limited to sun downing emeritus Freudians.) Hell, babysitting bought my Bachelors.
But the non-white nannies who don’t speak French or Mandarin? The ones with irregular work documents? They get exploited. Paid if at all under the table and less than min, their papers held so they can’t leave, isolated, treated like they don’t understand words/tone of voice.
(Yeah, if you haven’t figured it out, I am looking forward to the day when we eat the rich. Fried Green Tomatoes style. Secret’s in the sauce. Well, actually, compost the rich, because they’re full of toxic substances and humans are not terribly nutritious, pound for pound, compared to anything else. Better to improve the soil.)
I live in a relatively wealthy place. We have fairly easy to access electronic benefits, WIC, Medicaid. Our food banks do ok, we have good public schools though underfunded (Thanks, TABOR) with full day kindergarten and public pre-school. It’s possible to be poor here and make it. Barely. Housing kills. Gods forbid your landlord decide he wants to AirBNB.
So there’s support if you need to work. But work for daycare fees…
But if you stop working, since you’re only working to pay for daycare anyway – and stay at home…
well…
The reality is that a woman with a child only has about a year before it starts to really hurt. Her lifetime earnings as a mother who stayed home for one year with one child will take a 20% hit for 4 years. She’ll recover by the time the kid starts middle school at 12. She just can’t have another.
If she stops working for 2 years? She never recovers her earnings. Her lifetime earnings take a permanent hit, 10-20%. Stay out for 5? Up to 50% loss. She returns to work at a lower salary and hours, despite inflation. The economics of motherhood suck. Baby milk makes it barely doable to keep career.
If a male partner with a bachelors chooses to be the at home dad for 2 years? He’ll recover before the kid is 8. He’d have to sit out 8 years to lose as much as 2 years out hurts women in the workforce.
If that’s not structural sexism related to childbearing, I don’t know what is.
Some studies show men who take paternity leave get lower performance reviews, but it’s easier for them to move to another company at the same or better salary, even with a gap on their resume. This is especially true if they can fill that gap with anything, from ‘volunteer’ work like open-source coding/app dev or calling themselves independent contractors, even just handyman/shade-tree mechanic/volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. Women don’t get that benefit.
So. You’re a woman who wants a career and a baby. If you don’t go into labor with an extra year’s salary in the bank, if your marriage/partnership doesn’t survive the earthquake that is parenthood, if your employer doesn’t approve…
The FMLA – Fuck My Life Act -oops, Family Medical Leave Act– – says you get 12 unpaid weeks off for a qualifying event and your employer has to bring you back at the same salary with the same type of job. Assuming you’re not a temp. Not 1099. Self-employed? You’re fucked.
FMLA doesn’t require you get your job back. Like, if you were tech support and climbed the ladder to the good tech support jobs, say for a specific client, your employer doesn’t have to put you back. You can be put back in the pool, taking rando incoming level one support calls.
You were a pastry specialist? You were gone. We hired a replacement. Now you’re a prep cook. Salary remains same, but the intangibles — the prestige, the recognition, the slightly better or more interesting work, the client and coworker relationships — aren’t compensation, and aren’t regulated.
Note: Many shrinks are considered contractors, not employees. No benefits in many practices. Self-employment taxes. No FMLA or protections. Don’t become a shrink it you think it’s a route to wealth, job security and happiness.
We don’t talk about it, but bad employers make new moms’ working conditions worse to make them quit. It’s consistent enough that there’s an entire branch of employment law that caters to both sides. Some employers feel betrayed that she took time off. They had to pay a temp. Mom’ll take more time. They get passive aggressive and take it out on the returning employee.
Who, as it happens, is probably in the midst of a hormone storm, sleep deprivation, recovering from a major injury and oh, right, taking care of a new human who has no words and no off switch. New moms aren’t at the top of their ‘reading the asshole weather game at 12 weeks post-partum.
An employer can get away with being a complete douche-canoe if they’re a little subtle. Employment law and the labor board will probably side with the employer over the hysterical, shrill, stressed lil woman cuz really, she just wants free money so she can go back to her baby and…
Fulfill her destiny to be a stay at home mother!
That’s why I call it the Fuck My Life Act. As Admiral Akbar says, It’s a TRAP.
Babymilk is the secret sauce that makes the daycare to maternity leave is a shitstorm to take this job and shove it to Kill your career cycle work. So if we just didn’t have formula…
No. Please go back to the top. Biological determinism, forced lactation, human tissue harvesting, Blue Nipple ads on podcasts.
That is the Bad Place that looks like The Good Place only when compared to the shitstorm. The one with the chowder fountains.
Oh, and if you’re a woman in a developing country without any safety net, if your parents died of malaria, your aunties got killed years ago, your man got conscripted, you have to work. There’s no alternative. Consider Bangladesh, in the garment factories. You’ll need babymilk.
Babymilk increases the risk your kid will die, but working increases the chance your kid will go to school and you’ll both be able to financially stable by the time the kid reaches adolescence. It’s the same trap, and all of these women are gambling with their old age care.
In the US, the question is do you retire? In developing countries, it’s does your kid live to take care of you. When I say rational decisions, I mean hyper-rational and hard. Women in developing countries are the opposite of stupid. They’re just stuck with horrible circumstances and information.
There’s no win here, because both sides of this are based on
Wait
structural misogyny.
To make this work, we gotta get that shit out of the mix. We must stop punishing the people who sustain our species. Since it takes two to make a baby, both people must get and take parental leave.
Yes, both. And not Zuckerberg’s fake “paternity leave” where the dude spent six weeks sitting on the couch and playing Fortnite after changing one diaper a day. (That calls for justifiable homicide as far as I’m concerned.) Here’s my ideal, assuming a two parent family:
Both parents are off for at least 3 weeks before due date, and for at least 12 weeks after. Let’s say 16 weeks guaranteed, required, paid leave. It takes a minimum of six weeks to heal after an uncomplicated vaginal birth. Ten from a C-section. They also should see a visiting nurse, every 2-3 days.
Babies have fucked sleep schedules until about 12 weeks, with a especially bad patch around 9-11 weeks. (Shaking trauma SPIKES at 10 weeks because babies that were eating and sleeping just… stop. That software build is BUGGY as fuck! But it passes in the next patch.)
Both parents need some fucking sleep during that time. That’s why both parents are off. Right now, women get so sleep deprived after birth, plus the pain and the lifestyle expectations and JustNoMIL stories and …
(As a PTSD researcher, I can tell you how to create PTSD: put someone in pain for an extended time frame, expose their private parts, don’t tell them what’s happening, deprive them of sleep for days/weeks/months and wake them up just when they hit RE… Why yes, PTSD and post-partum depression *do* look remarkably alike to me.)
Caveat: this assumes healthy baby and parents. Disability can extend it, or transform it to Disabled caretaker. Also, no exceptions. Jimmy Kimmel takes paternity leave and Mindy Kahling subs for him. The sandwich artist and the manicurist and the roofer all take leave and all get paid.
Around 12 weeks, babies start to get easier. Then both parents can go back to work a little. Parents need adult interaction and stimulation. Each parent gets 12 work hours a week, 3 half days. Different half days. They need to escape EACH OTHER, too. Both still get paid leave.
This lasts until kid starts crawling, around 6-8 months. Then it’s time for kiddo to spend 4-6 hours a day at the crèche, chillin’ with other babies, getting appropriate socialization as a member of a social species. Both parents need to see other adults, have meaningful work, and alone time. Both work 25 hours a week, divide as needed. At a year, baby goes full time crèche.
Parents get their adult lives back. One wants to stay home? Kid still goes to crèche. A single adult cannot provide all social-emotional development. So parent gets to volunteer, have relationships with adults. Shower. Be a human who isn’t a baby support bot. Children belong to themselves first.
What about single mothers? Remember, it takes a village. Visiting nurses, respite carers, retirees who like to hold babies but don’t have family nearby. We help people build support systems all the time. That’s social work and logistics. It’s just a data problem.
108. Remember, I love daycare. The crèche model makes better human beings who get along with others and expect their society to be about interdependence and the social community. Isolated babies become selfish adults because they never have to wait, share, or cooperate.
And no, siblings aren’t enough. Kids need developmental peers as well as those well above and behind. A toddler who only plays with older kids gets frustrated and tantrumy that they can’t do what the big kids do. A toddler who only has younger babies? They don’t develop new skills.
But THOSE PEOPLE (by which certain white people mean those slutty slut slut women who have hair they don’t understand or tattoos or too much melanin) will exploit the system! No employer will ever have enough employees! THOSE women will have too many babies!
We’ve never tried full employment. What we call full employment is 4-12% of adults not working. 4% is those drawing Unemployment benefits. It doesn’t count those who have been unemployed longer, are taking care of children/elderly, working 2+ part time jobs or gigging it.
Which means dude, we’ve got so much excess capacity that we can send about 1% of the workforce home for 4 months and part-time for another 8. (Also, weren’t you just shitposting about population crash, not enough workers for tax base? Don’t we want people having more babies?)
But we can’t afford —
No, seriously. Do you think there’s a giant ball of gold at Ft Knox? You think that’s a good idea? Why? Don’t. Back to basics: gold isn’t edible, bad insulator, heavy. It’s just shiny. We stopped doing money that way and it’s a REALLY good thing.
Go read Debt, the First 5000 years, by David Graeber; and Capital, by Thomas Piketty. And Political Order and Political Decay, by Francis Fukuyama. And The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. That’s your 101 start. Come back when you’ve finished. Take notes, you will be graded!)
Governments print money and it’s fine. It’s not a private budget, nor a credit card. Money’s entire value is that you believe in it and so does the issuing government. Gold coins are worthless in the middle of a burnt desert with no water, salt, or food.
Also, no more Glenn Beck for you.
Really. Stop. It’s fine. We can totally pay for social support. Do you know what $3.25 Trillion buys? The US spends about the same amount, plus or minus a few billion. At those numbers, a billion is not much. Yes, we have a deficit. It’s no big deal. When we don’t is when we’re fucked.
We can pay for social support, as Universal Basic Income or as parental leave supplementation, or however we want to structure it. Look, you’ve been lied to. A lot. You need a ton of remedial reading and this isn’t that class. Bye, now!
But THOSE women —
You mean the white women who keep calling cops on little kids being little kids? Or the ones saying it’s fine to put little kids in cages? Or the white women who won’t get their kids their shots, so other vulnerable babies die? Yeah, okay, sure. No parental leave for them.
No, THOSE women —
Oh, you’re being racist. Got it.
(How old are you again? Over 50? Yeah, I’m gonna outlive you by 20, 30 years. I don’t actually care what you think. 🖕)
And you’ve made it abundantly clear that *your* parents didn’t have daycare available to properly socialize you.
North America’s whiteness is the result of vile bad fortune and evil intentions. It’s only been so for a geologically insignificant moment. Nature is resetting the proper balance as is appropriate. Race and colorism is learned behavior, taught by ignorant people.
123. Or more simply, there’s no such thing as THOSE women. There’s just women who happen to live here.
(Anyway, moving on, and we’re in the downslope now… Thanks for sticking with me! )
BTW: if your last name is Irish, Polish, Italian, German, Slavic, Jewish, Spanish, Portuguese, some variants of Norwegian or Swedish… you weren’t white until recently anyway. Being White meant only being England English and not the filthy York part that’s practically Scotland. And ONLY Protestant, and of that mostly Anglican/Episcopalian, and only a few Dissenter sects like Methodists and Presbyterians. It didn’t count
So probably not you. Be glad – the food and music is so much better when you’re not stuck with only English Country Dancing and boiled turnips.
Anyway, having slagged my own ancestry (I’m East Anglian Quaker and a single Welsh Methodist by descent, though some great-uncles married into the Miami band a long time ago to preserve Miami land rights and I 💜English Country Dance) and gotten deeply distracted…
Neither the breastfeeding side nor the formula side exist outside of structural misogyny. They reinforce each other to damage equality by asserting biological determinism or libertarian capitalism. Ideally, we would never have this argument. It’s the “Let’s You and Him Fight” scam.
The people who push the Leche Paratroopers use activist energy to force women’s interests below the child. What child? Doesn’t matter. Nebulous. Just not poor women’s kids. Drive-thru woman can’t be allowed 20 minutes to go pump. They only see mothers as milk bots and diaper changers.
They use brown moms in places experiencing colonialist exploitation because the breast campaign permits the delay of water provision, reduces food aid costs and presents a tool to be used against women in wealthier or urban places who might want to own their bodies and labor.
While the Working Parent Brigade is fed at least some of its energy by a destructive late stage capitalist employer system that considers all people spare parts to be discarded if they are not perfectly serviceable all the time.
And the capitalist employer system doesn’t especially want to be paying those brown women, either in aid or salary, so they’re happy to see the Working Parents Brigade and the Leche Paratroopers kill each other in the trench. They watch the fight on Pay Per View.
Both of these are EVIL and will happily see every one of us die of thirst, malnutrition, or overwork if it serves their narrow interest.
The real root of international breastfeeding activism is the fact that Nestle sold formula to women in countries without reliable sources of clean water. That meant those babies were more likely to die of diarrhea. This happened 45 years ago and people were RIGHTLY outraged.
Without being a Nestle apologist (they’re the 1st battle group in the pending Water Wars and the babymilk battle ceded WAY too much Water War territory to them) Nestle did improve. They’re the only formula manufacturer that conforms to WHO’s babymilk code. Nobody else does, and nobody else gets shit on the way Nestle does.
And that is the most damning of faint praise.
The women who chose babymilk didn’t pick wrong. Formula lets anyone feed a baby. Older siblings, grandparents, Dad. Friends. Formula allows a village to raise a child. Formula means the baby is comfortable while Mom is bathing or working or just being human for 2 minutes
Formula is an instrument of egalitarian feminism, which posits that women are first and foremost human beings with agency over themselves. Formula’s invention permitted the idea that parenting is voluntary, and the love of a mother is not shackled. It is not forced. Mother’s milk is not a chain.
The Breastfeeding Only side derives from biological determinist feminism, with a big dose of colonialist condescension. It says women’s agency endangers others and must be stopped.
Psst: biological determinism isn’t feminism. It’s patriarchy in drag. It hates women and children and anyone who isn’t already in power, because it seeks to preserve the power structure in place. Note where BF advocates push for pumping and feeding rooms — they’re not demanding retail and service workplaces improve access for service workers. It’s all in the upper echelons of white collar work.
1=You know what would have been a better punishment than 45 years of Nestle boycott while giving them the Big Water fort for the developed world? Making them deploy water purification and transport technology wherever they sold the formula that got mixed with bad water that killed the babies.
140. Imagine if, instead of disposable, non-recyclable bottle tech, Nestle had put that money into wells and solar stills and the battery tech for point of use purification? What if they were forced to rehabilitate the cocoa plantations they fucked up? What if we required Nestle to provide actual AGENCY they sold instead of a poison illusion?
You know how you make a multinational behave? Well, the International Human Rights Court at The Hague is the start. Call it genocide or mass human rights abuse and PROSECUTE THE C SUITE. From all divisions. Arrest them when they cross into a signatory country. Use passport control.
They can bail out. They just have to booked and printed and show up for court. Often. A corporation can’t skip every country. Well, they could confine themselves to countries that haven’t signed human rights accords, but North Korea isn’t very lovely any time of year.
I am not actually suggesting anything too difficult. It just takes courage and the willingness to piss off people who need markets full of wealthy consumers more than the wealthy consumers need them. We buy their shit, which keeps them in business. Not other way ‘round… Unless we think of human beings as products to be sold and consumed.
And thus, Blue Nipple. The choice is that simple:
Do we support a world where anyone can be commodified or one where our commodities and those who sell them work for us?
Like money, corporations exist by our will.
They can be dismantled. Surprisingly easily. (Hi, MySpace!)
Let’s fight the real war, not the fake news battle.
Thanks for sticking with me. If you like my dystopian view of humanity, I write fiction! I’m releasing a fantasy series about a civil war. I’d love to have you along for that ride.
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