Matthew sits down with ace journalist EJ Dickson to explore her deep archive of reporting on the policing of women's bodies, and how it reflects on her own experience of childbirth.This episode opens and closes with reference to the essay that first introduced Matthew to this world, "Giving Birth in Yogaland," written by his partner Alix, after two C-section deliveries.Show Notes"Giving Birth in Yogaland" —Alix Caleraggapunzel on Instagram —water birth on the beachCovid-19 Vaccine: How Dommes Are Convincing Submissives to Get JabsMatt Gaetz, QAnon Followers, and the GOP Are Exploiting the #FreeBritney MovementAre Sex-Negative 'Puriteens' Actually Taking Over the Internet?'Pastel QAnon' Is Infiltrating the Natural Parenting CommunityPrincess Diana Struggled With Bulimia. Does 'The Crown' Do Her Justice? The Baby-Formula Shortage Has Spawned a New Brand of Mom-ShamersRoe v. Wade: Top Influencers Avoid Abortion Debate - Rolling StoneAmber Heard, Johnny Depp: TikTok Reenactments of Testimony Goes ViralMichelle Phan: How YouTube Beauty Guru Fell in With Bullshit PeddlerThere Are a Million Reasons to Get An Abortion. This Was Mine.Bentinho Massaro: Instagram Guru 'F-king' His Followers 'To Freedom' In Minnie Mouse's D
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Personal essays, deep research dives, tense but cordial discussions about the politics of conspirituality between Julian and I.
And we also have a big ongoing Early Access program at the moment called the Swan Song Series in which we examine the historical and cultural roots that inform and fuel Teal Swan's spectacle.
Now Early Access means that we'll paywall each of these for a few weeks and then we're going to put them right here like little manifestation miracles on your main feed in addition to our main episodes.
And the first one we'll release very soon is an episode called Close to Home, which features Julian describing how a cultish yoga group that he was in during the late 1990s and early aughts, led by Anna Forrest, trauma-bonded over her insistence that her students harbored repressed memories of childhood abuse.
Then we have an interview with Paola Marino on what it means to view Teal Swan through an artistic lens back in 2017 for her film Open Shadow.
In the third episode, we look at Marino's interview with the Bosworths, this is Teal Swan's mom and dad, on her childhood.
And in that one we talk about her possible highly sensitive person status and the notion that some cult formations are social expressions of post-traumatic play.
And by the way, after we posted that one to Patreon, some subscribers informed us that the highly sensitive person designation is often used as a quasi-ableist descriptor for autism.
by new age influenced parents who are looking for an idealizing framework for their children's neurodivergence.
And sometimes this actually obstructs the process of getting a diagnosis and adequate treatment.
Now, we did not know this, and this is one of the ways in which we so appreciate being in dialogue with our listeners.
There are episodes that are still in the pipeline, not yet on Patreon, like the first two of three pieces that Julian and I have recorded on Michelle Remembers, looking specifically at its traditional Catholic framework as part of the larger reactionary looking specifically at its traditional Catholic framework as part of the larger reactionary response to Vatican II, and Pope
Post Conciliar 1972 statement that, quote, the smoke of Satan has entered through a crack in the church.
Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, the authors of Michelle Remembers, actually quote the Pope on the first page of their book, so this isn't just some academic exercise.
We also use materials like Dr. Bernard Dougherty's Five Characteristics of the Catholic Horror Film genre that begins with Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby in 1968.
Dougherty says that basically all Catholic horror films instantiate a devotion to the Virgin Mary in opposition to growing feminist awareness.
They all deliver preternatural gore that threaten the clean surfaces of post-war suburbia, They offer the vicarious suffering of the victim soul or ways in which women especially and especially their bodies are conceived of as metaphysical battlefields.
He also pings the anxiousness of priests who feel that they've lost touch with their vocation in a modern world.
And, of course, the heart of every Catholic horror film, a satanic conspiracy.
So, through this lens applied to Michelle Remembers, we can start to understand how the satanic panic largely emerges through this slow-motion, just chaotic emotional breakdown in the global Catholic Church as it meets and attempts to navigate the postmodern age.
Episode 115, Controlling Women's Bodies Naturally with EJ Dixon.
Almost five years after my partner Alex gave birth to our first son by emergency c-section, and then one year after giving birth to our second son through a planned c-section,
She had the space and the perspective it took to write a stellar piece of first-person journalism about the reactionary cultural pressures that set the stage for how she was first encouraged to think about giving birth and then how she came to deconstruct those pressures.
And the title of this article says a lot.
It's called Giving Birth in Yogaland.
Alex and I were still both yoga teachers at the time, and looking back at it, that publication marked a threshold out of that world, I think, and we were both crossing it.
It was published by Jennalyn Carson at the old Yogadork.com blog site in 2017.
And as if an age has truly passed, Yogadork is now defunct, so I'm going to link to the piece via web archive and post that in the show notes.
In the article, Alex recounted her own story, but also quoted from a series of interviews she did with other women yoga teachers.
Jill described being told by a colleague that a C-section birth only happened for women who weren't ready to be mothers.
Lila was told she should forgo pain medication, ostensibly for spiritual reasons.
Maria, who at the time of the interview was an editor for Yoga Journal in Russia, shared that she was seen as a failure in her circles for messing up her home birth plans.
So these subjects all reported really hurtful and delusional comments and attitudes, delivered with such piety and earnestness and by people who otherwise would present themselves as progressives or even feminists.
And then Alex brought all of the research receipts as well.
She tracked the racist and eugenicist origins of the natural birth movement through figures like Grantley Dick Reed, who in the 1950s sought to encourage white women to accept their reproductive burden with grace and self-sacrifice, lest the quote-unquote tribals outpaced them in birthing.
She also tracked how many of these values trickled down, gently laundered by New Age juices into the non-intersectional feminist world of Ina May Gaskin, the modern matriarch of natural birth, who remarked that women who wanted epidurals were princesses and thought that maternal mortality rates for black women were attributable to illicit drug use
And they might die less often with the help of prayer and homegrown food.
Now, in actuality, if Gaskin had actually served black women in an anti-racist way, her innovations and skills might have helped push back against the horrible history of how black women have been treated in hospital settings.
The basic argument of Alex's article is that obsessions over how people should give birth carry the weight of conflicting cultural desires.
Turning the birthing person's body into a battlefield between warring factions deciding what is natural or artificial Whether experiencing pain is transformative or actually a sign of spiritual weakness, what is empowering versus what is shameful, and then in terms of the mysterious baby, what is auspicious and what is ominous.
And all of these decisions about what it means to be properly female, enforced in a way that seemingly no one can get right, and that might be the point, are made ideologically and not interpersonally.
The mother and baby both are owned by the discourse, and nobody seems to be asking either of them how they feel or what they need.
And to give you a sense of how Alex makes this argument, here's a few graphs.
For those who have been steeped in the empowerment narratives of the natural birth movement, the urge towards natural birthing may be rooted in more than a personal desire for a particular somatic experience.
It may equally be about participating, consciously or not, in a politicized process that seeks to take birthing back from standardized medicine.
Viewed this way, the split between natural and unnatural becomes even more charged, seeming to express a divide between feminist and patriarchal.
For how has the intervention been made into a symbol of oppression?
How does a cesarean birth or a birth with epidural make some of us feel as if we're failing to free ourselves from a paternalistic system?
Is this the politicized essence of the real birth?
Is it what we imagine will take us beyond bondage?
Adrienne Rich writes in Of Woman Born that no more devastating image could be invented for the bondage of woman than the birthing woman, quote, sheeted, supine, drugged, her wrists strapped down and her legs in stirrups at the very moment when she is bringing new life into the world, unquote.
It's a searing image.
There is truth in it, too.
Some of us have been traumatized by a medical system that sometimes puts its own anxieties before the idiosyncratic rhythms of labor.
However, Rich's evocation of a generalized female body replicates the very problem she critiques.
Her nameless woman, who has no voice, no history, and no social context, is a faceless object, pinned down not only by a cool medical gaze, but by the point of Rich's argument, too.
I have been that woman, pinned down twice.
My first cesarean birth was traumatic.
I felt myself caught, specimen-like, under the fluorescent eye of the operating room.
My flesh was stunned by death's nearness.
But I recognize now that the physiological trauma was amplified by the narratives which preceded it.
Long before giving birth, I had internalized Rich's faceless woman.
I had come to believe that interventions were automatic signifiers of subjugation.
In other words, once my birth began to look a certain way, my disempowerment became a foregone conclusion.
As I began to resemble Rich's woman, I simply assumed I had become her.
The second birth was a planned c-section.
I had weighed my options and I had chosen to be there.
That second cesarean counts among the most empowered experiences of my life.
From the outside, it may still have looked like subjugation.
On the inside, it felt like anything but.
Later, when I told people that I had had a healing Caesarian birth, they politely tried to hide their confusion.
Really?
They said.
And I knew they were thinking of Rich's woman too.
Okay, so why is this a conspirituality subject beyond the fact that I love this essay?
I've got three reasons.
Firstly, at the heart of the conspirituality technique is the reflex of abstraction, and this is native to both spirituality and conspiracy theories.
And what happens is that it takes complex human realities and reduces them to elements in a grand morality play about where the world is apparently going.
Now, with birthing, it's really attacking the most or focusing on the most existential human reality of all.
Alongside death, it's at the inexpressible heart of everything, really.
It's the moment we came to be, and now it's pounced on and instrumentalized.
Further, that abstraction always carries a political valence, and it leans rightward even when it's coded left.
Second reason.
That right-word tack points inexorably towards somatic fascism, or a mania for controlling bodies so that they can perform ideological tasks, building a race, a nation, or a vision of triumphant and heteronormative domestic life.
In right-wing coded circles, that mania is externally imposed by strongmen, demagogues, Nurse Ratched, and an anxious nationalism that enforces behavioral rules and social norms.
In the yoga and wellness coded circles, that mania can be fully internalized for neoliberal productivity.
The person expresses mastery over themselves, and because they are doing it, they can call it empowerment, and freedom, and even spirituality.
So whether from the right or the pseudo-left, the work is urgent, and if it is not accomplished, something terrible will happen.
Third reason.
When I read Alex's essay in 2017, it really pushed me further down a pathway of figuring out the deeply reactionary politics of wellness and yoga culture, especially in relation to women's bodies.
I had originally thought that these spaces fostered largely progressive, pro-social, pro-feminist movements that sought to encourage internal empowerment independently of conventional consumerist culture.
Now, parts of that view were true and account for the fact that I had a small circle of friends with similar values within those spaces.
But on the whole, these subcultures served to rationalize and even spiritualize deeply conservative values amongst people who prided themselves as liberal.
Values like gender essentialism, bodily purification, ableism, and anti-intellectualism.
And now here we are, in the wake of the destruction of Roe v. Wade, and it's not just that yoga and wellness demographics have zero response when it comes to really advocating for things like reproductive agency.
These spaces are active vectors for influencers like Christiane Northrup, Kelly Brogan, J.P.
Sears, and Kim Amani, who all express active contempt for the idea that reproductive agency is a social or political issue, as opposed to some sort of spiritual test you can master with herbs and sacred pole dancing.
And the body policing, of course, overflows with contempt towards trans people.
So as I mentioned earlier, Yoga Dork is defunct and that means that, in my view, this article needs a new host.
Being a writer is not Alex's profession.
She's a psychotherapist.
So she doesn't want to pitch it out again or put it on Medium where she's going to get pinged with questions and responses.
But she is open to it being more widely available.
So if you have a platform that can republish it, send along a DM and we'll convene over whether or not it's a fit.
Now my guest today, E.J.
Dixon is a writer, a prolific one, in the journalism trenches with Rolling Stone and other publications.
And when I found out by DM that some of her current interests and personal experiences track with what Alex was writing about in 2016, I became very interested in how her archive as a whole is doing this work of connecting multiple vectors of this emerging I became very interested in how her archive as a whole is doing this work of connecting multiple vectors of this emerging body
So we open this interview with a little bit of Dixon's own description of what her social circles expected of her as a birthing person.
And then we go on to explore how those attitudes circle outwards.
Dixon has to have more than a hundred reports and features out by now, a lot of them through Rolling Stones.
So there's so many that she's not even linking them all on her personal site.
So So I've picked out a handful here and I'll link them in the show notes that start to pull together a thesis for my interview with her.
So, I think she first came to my awareness when she coined the term, amazing term, Cue a Mom, to describe what might be the ultimate form of laundered neo-fascism, as mommy influencers started to appropriate QAnon memes in 2020, and also its rhetoric, and then repackage these themes in decor porn or vegan smoothie recipes.
Dixon has also covered anti-vax and COVID denialist influencers along a spectrum of identities and political commitments.
Many more are on the right, but for instance she profiles the non-binary Unicult founder Unicole Unicron who offered followers religious exemptions from the COVID vaccine.
She also covered Kimberly Vanderbeek, the partner of James on Dawson's Creek.
She covered beauty guru Michelle Phan, who seems to have gotten alt-med-pilled by Joe Dispenza.
She also covered Yolande Norris-Clark's vibe on free-birthing and rejecting all medical interventions for women, always.
She has also covered some unique pro-vaccine activism.
There's one piece about women doms demanding that their submissive male clients get vaccinated, which is really funny because it pivots on the morbid sexualization of vaccination as intrusion.
And underneath all of Dixon's compelling, often entertaining, sometimes zany reports, there's this drone about what happens to people's bodies, specifically people who are not cis men, and the obsessions, culturally, we have with policing bodies.
There's an old article up on Vox about an aesthetician named Yves Taub, who's sort of the Age of Dr. Ruth, who offers vaginal bleaching so that her clients can feel competitive with porn stars.
She's written about how Netflix's The Crown addressed the topic of Lady Diana's bulimia.
There's this wild piece with a lot of crossover content in which Dixon covered how MAGA QAnon jumped all over the Free Britney movement as if they actually cared about the conservatorship and her well-being.
There's this wild piece about another transphobic sex panic in which a bunch of people thought that they saw a dick in Minnie Mouse's panties.
And then, on the missing in action file, Dixon has also been tracking the eerie silence from the influencer sphere about the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
In other words, where the typical wellness and sovereignty gurus might be frothing at the mouth over the end of equal abortion access in the U.S.
and what that means for personal autonomy, we hear crickets.
So that's the rundown.
The links are in the notes.
Here's the interview.
EJ.
Dixon, thank you for taking the time to join us on Conspirituality Podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Now, I've noted in my prerecorded intro, you have this Rolling Stone archive on internet strangeness, the plight of exploited sex workers, and the virtual whiplash between OnlyFans trends and Puritan culture.
You report on influencers who monetize conspiracy theories.
You do a lot on online cult leaders.
And you've been at this for seven years.
And if I was to peg a through line, it would be about how marginalized bodies are socially controlled.
And I know that you started your reporting on the sex work beat.
And so I wanted to start by asking, how did this inform your understandings of power, gender inequality, and body policing that you now bring to your work on internet culture in conspiracy theories, cults, and public health?
I mean, I think it absolutely conformed it.
Sex workers exist on the margins of society.
They're sort of the ultimate example of marginalized figures whose bodies are being controlled by patriarchal forces.
So, I mean, it's hard not to see sort of a direct through line there.
Is it fair to see in all of the reporting that you've done that between the rise of influencer culture and the intensification of it and the rise of QAnon and now like real world backlashes against Me Too and Roe v. Wade that we've entered a new era of patriarchal sex panics and body control?
I mean, it certainly feels like that if you look in my mentions.
Right.
I mean, and if you look at the type of harassment I'm getting for speaking out about things that were not considered controversial a year or two ago, I mean, it certainly feels like there's very much a cultural regression going on.
With that being the 30,000 foot view, This whole landscape is also obviously very personal for you, not just because you're a person in the world, but also because you are a parent and I know that you've been tracking with kind of personal interest how body control ideologies that are especially reactionary and coming from the right impact women and families and that this covers everything from
You know, giving birth and how one gives birth to breastfeeding and the micromanaging of infants and even older children.
But let's start with birth.
You mentioned by direct message that you gave birth via an emergency c-section and my wife had a similar experience and so I have some idea of how harrowing that can be on a purely existential level.
And so I wanted to ask, what did the dominant culture tell you about that birth?
How was that experience held for you?
Well, I think the thing that was more harrowing for me, it wasn't the experience itself so much as it was the idea that I was supposed to be harrowed by it.
It wasn't actually, I guess it wasn't technically Technically, it was an emergency c-section, but I knew I was going to be having a c-section because my son was breached.
Right.
So I had known, I had sort of emotionally prepared myself for this for a while.
But whenever I told people that, they were like, Oh, don't you feel like you're... They never said this explicitly, but it was sort of like, They were like 80% of the way there in saying this explicitly.
Don't you feel like you're being deprived of the natural childbirth experience?
Or don't you feel like you're part of the larger medical industrial complex?
Or that your doctor is just doing this because They want to go out and play golf afterwards.
And first of all, I don't, I don't think my doctor plays golf.
Um, but if she did, then I, you know, whatever, whatever gets her on the course or whatever.
I, I don't know the nomenclature of golf, so I can't make like a joke there, but, um, uh, but that aside, I mean, It just had never really occurred to me that there was any right or wrong way to give birth prior to that.
So like so long as like I was healthy and my baby was healthy.
So it was kind of shocking to me that people were expecting me to be more horrified by this experience than I actually was.
And I want to be clear, like it wasn't.
It wasn't fun.
I actually don't think I was fully emotionally prepared for the recovery.
My son was in the NICU for a day.
At the time, I think I was too shell-shocked to wrap my mind around the implications of that and the pain and stuff.
I don't think I was fully prepared for that.
But I would say my larger takeaway even now from the whole experience was Okay, well, what does it mean that people are telling me that this is somehow a shortcoming on my part, that I didn't give birth the quote-unquote right way?
Yeah, I'm wondering what they wanted from you and if you had been able to tell a better story, how you would have relieved them of something and what that would be.
I mean, what became clear to me while I was pregnant and after I gave birth is that they wanted a performance of pain or sacrifice.
They wanted to know that I was going to be in labor for hours and hours.
They wanted to know that this was going to be...
Physically traumatizing experience for me and the way that they conceived of it.
I don't know if that's the calculus they were doing in their heads, but I mean, it became very apparent to me that a huge part of motherhood is just performing pain and performing sacrifice.
And I think that My failure to live up to their expectations in part was sort of what was prompting that reaction.
It almost seems like if that pain and sacrifice isn't there, that it didn't actually happen or that it's incomplete in some way.
And it almost reminds me, like speaking as an ex-Catholic, it reminds me of this sense that if the suffering of life isn't fully sort of If it's not made visible, and if it's not palpable, then the thing that is supposed to be happening isn't actually happening.
It's a very strange kind of echo of that for me.
Yeah, I mean, that sounds right.
On the other end of the spectrum, I sent you an Instagram post that went a little bit viral a couple of weeks back now, and it's from a person named Raga Poonsal, who got a bit of traction by
Videoing not her actual free birth in 10 inches of water on the beach in Nicaragua but by showing kind of the moments afterwards apparently and the umbilical cord is still attached and she has this kind of beneficent presence and what's interesting to me about
Contrasting the story of how your birth was received is that we have almost an opposing performance here of somebody who's showing that they can do something effortlessly in the natural environment without even any help or intervention, and they can do it all on their own.
And so that seems to be another sort of ideal that's presented in this whole landscape of how is one to do these natural functions in the best possible way.
What did you make of that post?
I mean it's hard for me to be inherently offended by it because I mean I'm very much a believer in like choice and you know if somebody feels that they That giving birth, having an unassisted birth on a beach is the way that they conceive of the introduction to their parenting experience.
Then who am I to tell them that's not the right choice for them?
That's beautiful.
That's beautiful if that's what they want.
But it's also hard not to consider the context of this, which is that she posted this on Instagram.
And I think that there is this performance of like, look at what my body can do naturally.
I think there is this performance of natural superiority that goes on with a lot of these types of influencers that you can't really ignore that context when you consider.
Posts like this, and it's also very hard.
It's very, I mean, I don't personally consider it hard because I don't feel shame about like anything, let alone like how I gave birth.
But I mean, I could imagine that a mother who felt a great deal of shame and regret about her birthing experience because she maybe wanted something like this and couldn't have it for a variety of medical or logistical reasons could see this post and feel like great shame about it.
And I think that shame is pretty intentional.
I hear two things which is on a personal level when we're thinking about whoever this person is in Nicaragua she's made a choice and it looks like it's turned out well and it seems to be very fulfilling and on some sort of personal level that has to be you know her right and something to celebrate and then there's this problem of The parasocial kind of, I don't know, like virality.
Putting it on Instagram really is about saying, this is how things should be.
This is how things can be better in the world.
There's a lot of influence involved in what is otherwise a personal choice.
And I think a lot of influencers might actually feel that, oh, hey, I'm just recording my own personal life without acknowledging that, uh, they're actually, um, putting a lot of influence out there.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think that's specific to the natural childbirth realm either.
No, no.
You know, like I, I don't think influencers really consider the responsibility that they have to their audience in, in lots of, Regards, I mean, this is like a very micro level example, but I was actually, I was talking, you might want to cut this, I don't, it's a little bit tangential, but I was talking to my friend, I was talking to my friends about Sidney Sweeney's Miu Miu outfit on the red carpet at the MTV Movie Awards.
Right.
A couple of weeks ago.
Yeah.
And there was this whole discourse about how like, I mean, all she was doing, she was wearing this outfit that was like very, it had a, she was sort of like bringing back the low rise trend.
It was like a very self-consciously, like early 2000s era throwback.
And there's been a lot of discussion about how that specific era of fashion has been really, was like really toxic and poisonous.
For people around my age, women who grew up around my age and developed serious body dysmorphia and disordered eating habits because of it.
And my friends were sort of arguing like, Sydney Sweeney, by virtue of just wearing this outfit on the red carpet, isn't really perpetuating that or trying to bring that back.
Her body looks the way it does.
She looks amazing.
And I think that's true.
You know, it's not like Sidney Sweeney's quote unquote fault.
Right.
You know, if women look at that picture, especially young women and think, oh, my body should look like that.
But it is something that people who are in the position that Sidney Sweeney have kind of have to consider, you know, for better or for worse, like for You know, they have to factor into a lot of choices they make.
And I think just to bring it back to this specific influencer, you know, I think that it's sort of like the same calculus that's not being made that should be made that's going on here.
Because there are a lot of women who very much believe that natural childbirth on a beach in Nicaragua is like sort of the idealized situation of childbirth.
And There are many reasons why that might not necessarily be the case for them, but these kinds of, you know, super ideal as like Madonna and child throwback images show them that kind of cement that image for them as the ideal that it should be.
You know, it almost feels as though once you get to a certain follower count, it should be provided by somebody that you have, I don't know, like a sensitivity reader for your posts or something like that, who can say, hey, you know, the implication of doing this on the beach in Nicaragua is X, Y, and Z, or You know, this low-rise fashion is actually associated with A, B, and C. Do you want to consider that?
It would be great if we had some sort of threshold accountability, I don't know, help in that way, but I don't think that's going to happen.
Maybe.
I mean, I think on the spectrum of, like, irresponsibility of influencers, like both of these things rank pretty low.
Yeah.
I don't I don't want to say like these things that I just cited.
I don't want to say like, oh, Sidney Sweeney should be canceled or this woman should be canceled because of this post or because of this outfit.
She were like, I think that's fucking ridiculous.
But I just you just can't take.
You can't take the public performance factor out of things like this, you know, when you consider them like you can't really assess them based on their own merits.
You have to assess them based on the fact that they are performances, you know.
And I think we have to assess.
them, you know, in relation to their history and politics as well.
And this is where I wanted to ask you about, I know that you've done some looking into the idealization of natural birth and its history and its many early modern proponents.
And I wanted to ask you what you've learned about natural birthing and natural parenting movements so far as you work away at that topic.
Well, we were sort of discussing before, or you were rather discussing that, you know, this woman on the beach is sort of making it seem effortless.
Like she did this, you know, incredible feat unassisted, like no big deal without any pain.
And it even seems like a borderline, like pleasurable experience.
Right.
It's not just that she went through the sacrifice, but that the sacrifice became blissful.
Yeah, and that's very much that.
If you look at the roots of the history of the natural childbirth movement in the Western world, like that's very much by design, like that's a recurring theme throughout.
It was basically like the natural childbirth as we know it was founded by this guy, Grant Lee, Dick Reed, who was this British obstetrician in post-war.
England and he was he was concerned that middle class white women who had entered the workforce in large numbers to support the war effort weren't returning to the home immediately to have more children.
And you'll I mean, this is sort of a recurring theme with a lot of these types of like regressive parenting movements.
They're usually in reaction to a large number of women entering the workforce, which is very much, you know, by design.
And so basically his whole project was he was trying to convince women that childbirth didn't hurt.
He wrote, like, healthy childbirth was never intended by the natural law to be painful.
And that pain was more the result of their anxiety around labor rather than, you know, an inherent part of the birthing process.
Oh God, that's like peak mansplaining, my God.
His goal in doing this was sort of like to increase the birth rate among the quote-unquote civilized middle and upper middle classes to return to the home and have more children so there was sort of like a eugenicist part of this project as well.
Right, so this is a great replacement adjunct kind of movement really because it's concerned about if With our urbanization and our industrialization and with sort of rising levels of certain types of equality, if birth rates go down, then that's terrible for the right people.
So, quote unquote.
Yeah, and I also think this was a reaction to very legitimate concerns about over-industrialization of the birthing process.
I don't know if you're familiar, but there was a point, basically for the first 50 years of this country's history, it was considered standard for middle-class women to be put under twilight sleep.
During labor, like basically just to be completely unconscious during the entire process and to wake up and have no memory of it.
And it wasn't like it wasn't a choice.
You know, this is just what doctors thought it was an extremely paternalistic.
A method of childbirth.
And this was just what doctors thought would be best for women.
And it was very traumatizing to a lot of women.
Understandably so.
So I do think there was an element of this that was sort of a very legitimate response to that.
But you also can't really separate that from the fact that this guy basically just wanted the quote unquote right kinds of women to go back in the home and reproduce more.
And a large Part of the way that he was trying to do this was by convincing women that childbirth doesn't hurt and that if it does hurt, that it's all in your head and it's all your own fault.
And so if he can create a more romantic, creche-like mother and child or Madonna and child picture of it, then that's going to be great for culture in general as he sees it.
I think the Instagram post that we were discussing earlier is sort of like the apotheosis of that.
I think we're hinting at the fact that natural birth and parenting movements seem to uniformly track to the right.
They're about making sure that these things happen in orderly fashion and the right people have the right types of children in the right ways.
But I have heard some free birth proponents, for example, argue that their practices give women of color, for example, the chance to avoid this You know, white supremacist obstetrical system that has a lot of patriarchal elements to it that remove women's choices.
Now, have you encountered this argument and how have you come to think about it?
I have, and I think it's complicated.
I think, you know, the fact is that Black maternal health is currently, like, in crisis.
Legitimately, like, Black mothers are, I think, like, three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.
Black infants are twice as likely to die as white ones.
But there are also, and there are elements of the natural childbirth community that have sort of tried to position themselves in opposition of that to say, hey, here you can have more autonomy.
This is a safer and more autonomous way so you can have more control over your own birthing process.
But I think that it's also really failed women of color in that regard, because even as maternal mortality rates among women of color are skyrocketing, there are very few midwives and doulas who cater to black communities like it's primarily white women who have the luxury and the privilege to give birth At home with a midwife and or a doula.
And when women of color do opt for home births, you know, in the tragic instance that the baby dies or that something goes horribly wrong, like they're the ones who are often more targeted for criminal prosecution.
So even though home birth is framed as an empowering choice for all women, you know, in practice, that is not usually the case for women of color.
You've also written about a less dramatic version of these themes with regard, and maybe more a normalized version, and that's in relation to the current baby formula crisis in the US.
And that crisis has spotlighted a kind of new wave of breast is best, bottle feeding, shaming.
And it really seems as if women and mothers just can't possibly get it right.
And so I wanted to know your thoughts on that.
In the context of the formula shortage crisis that's currently going on, I noticed that there was sort of this backlash among women and among breastfeeding proponents in particular, who were saying Well, basically, to women who formula feed, well, basically, we told you so.
Why don't you just breastfeed?
Breastfeeding is free.
It's easy.
It's not a constraint on your time.
And you won't have to be dependent on these large corporations in order to do it.
All of which is true in theory, except as many people, as many women have pointed out, breastfeeding is only free and easy and not a constraint on your time if you don't value women's time at all.
Right.
I mean, my own My own breastfeeding process... There are all these difficulties that women can encounter in the breastfeeding process.
Whether it's latch issues, whether it's supply shortage issues, whether it's... They don't get maternal parental leave and they have to go back to work so they can't... They don't have the time to establish a breastfeeding relationship.
Because in order to establish a breastfeeding relationship with a baby, you have to do it basically immediately.
And you basically have to do it you know, every hour on the hour around the clock.
So the idea that breast is breast, while that might be true in theory, is not, it kind of discounts a lot of both social and biological factors that could prevent women from being able to breastfeed successfully.
And a lot of these breastfeeding proponents were sort of ignoring that in favor of pushing this narrative on women who were ultimately like incredibly vulnerable and like worrying that their babies were at risk of starvation.
And what I did see in response to that was sort of A renewed effort on behalf of the breastfeeding lobby to push this breast as best narrative, regardless of the many, many legitimate reasons why women may have been unwilling or unable to breastfeed their children.
And I know that you are really aware of the history and politics of that going back to the La Lecce League, which is still active in this movement.
What can you tell us about the politics of that?
Yeah, so the Breast is Best movement was basically single-handedly spearheaded by the La Leche League.
There are still... If I walked outside of my door right now and wanted to go to a breastfeeding support group, I would be able to do so because they're on basically every corner.
But a lot of people don't really realize that it was founded by Catholic housewives in 1956.
Like, at its core, an inherently, like, extremely Judeo-Christian values infused group.
It was inspired by the Christian family movement, and original members advocated for breastfeeding in large part, not because, like, breast was best, like, they didn't have the evidence, the scientific evidence to really support that, but it was because theologians and, like, people like Pope John Pius II had advocated for breastfeeding for years, largely because the mother had a moral quote-unquote duty.
To breastfeed and and that sort of strain that, you know, very conservative, religiously infused strain.
It wasn't just at inception like it has infused the group and infused the group for decades.
And like in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, like this is another example of a reactionary movement happening as women increasingly entered the workforce.
Allegedly saw this and they explicitly called for working mothers to Give up their jobs so they could stay at home and nurse their children, like earlier editions of their manual stated this explicitly.
And there was a massive split in the group over whether working mothers were even allowed to have leadership roles in the group.
And it's since rebranded as a secular organization, which has had allowed it to have tremendous impact on the public health discourse.
But I mean, you can still kind of see inklings of that influence, like to this day, like I remember when I was researching the La Leche League a couple years ago when my kid had just I saw that they had taken the stance that breastfeeding in itself is protective against postpartum depression and they like offered things like St.
John's Wort as like an alternative treatment for PPD rather than go on medications that may not be conducive to breastfeeding.
And I looked at that and I was like, they are really willing to tell women to sacrifice anything, their jobs, their autonomy, their mental health in order to preserve the breastfeeding relationship for the first couple of months of a baby's life.
And I found that pretty remarkable.
Did they present any evidence for some correlation between breastfeeding and a reduction in postpartum depression?
No.
Not that I can remember.
I don't remember being blown away by the pluperity of evidence that they had.
Right.
But there is evidence, I can tell you, because I researched this as well, that breastfeeding can... I'm not going to say it because I don't want to confuse correlation and causation here.
But if a woman struggles with breastfeeding, it can really complicate Already existing postpartum depression, or if she's already predisposed to postpartum depression, it can trigger those symptoms.
Because there's so much pressure to do it, and there's so much personal guilt that a mother feels when she can't do it effectively, that if you're predisposed to postpartum depression or anxiety, It makes sense, right?
It makes total sense why that would play a role.
I remember reading about this woman, this Canadian woman, who tragically took her own life a couple of years ago.
And her husband said that her struggles with breastfeeding... She had just given birth and her struggles with breastfeeding played a role in her depression.
And I don't want to say... Because that's anecdotal evidence, but... Right.
You know, it made a lot of sense to me as somebody who had just gone through this, who had just experienced great internalized shame and guilt and sadness over being unable to exclusively breastfeed my son.
Her story really resonated with me and it kind of infuriated me even more that organizations with as much power and influence as La Leche League were saying, oh whatever, don't go on antidepressants, don't worry about it, just take St.
John's Wort.
And you'll be fine.
Let me pull on that for one second, because what's the deal there?
They're not only saying that breastfeeding is going to be good for the mother's mental health, but that if it's not, that you should go towards a tincture or some naturopathic solution.
Is that because if you go to your GP or if you get a referral to a psychiatrist, that the psychiatrist is going to advise you to stop breastfeeding?
Uh, maybe?
I think it's more like antidepressant stigma, to be honest.
I don't know this for a fact, but this is just sort of my interpretation of this.
And to be fair, there are antidepressants that are known to be contraindicated with breastfeeding.
For sure.
So like that is true.
And there are other antidepressants where doctors will prescribe them, but there isn't like a ton of like robust data to suggest whether or not they're safe.
And there are others that, you know, there is pretty substantial amount of evidence to suggest that they're safe for, you know, pregnancy and breastfeeding.
So it's hard for me to understand Exactly why organizations like La Leche League would say that, keeping that in mind, because if you are worried about the maternal health of the mother, the mental health of the mother, right?
And you know that there is a great deal of evidence to support the fact that some antidepressants are safe for breastfeeding, then why wouldn't you just suggest that?
You know, so I do think it has a lot to do with medication stigma and the taboos around mental health.
Right.
I also want to say they might have changed this position.
Like this was like four years ago or five years that I was like really aggressively looking into this.
But I somehow I doubt it.
I doubt they would have.
Well, pulling things into the present and rounding up, you are what, 23 weeks pregnant, I think.
Is that right?
Did I get the time right?
I don't know.
Something like that.
Yeah.
I just wanted to say on behalf of myself, the co-hosts, all of our listeners I'm sure, we hope that you have all of the support and the luck possible and I think that's topical as well because that's not exactly what wellness culture generally offers because it focuses on individual heroism, the performance of virtue, divine blessings.
You know, this is a world in which luck and randomness are actually illegal, because if you accept those things into your worldview, then somehow the meritocracy crumbles.
So, I just wanted to ask you in closing, like, what are your childbirth values now?
And values that you would wish for and campaign for, for everyone?
I mean, choice.
It's really just as simple as that.
I mean, my own feelings about the natural childbirth movement aside and attachment parenting and, you know, nursing and not to nurse, like, you know, all of that aside.
The first time around, I was so vulnerable to all of these outside influences and to all of these people telling me what I should and should not do that I really, what I didn't appreciate and what I ultimately learned is that parenting is so difficult.
Under even the best of circumstances and the most ideal of circumstances.
And I, I did not experience it.
I, you know, I'm very lucky my son is, you know, healthy and, and, uh, safe, but you know, he's, he's dealt with his own, you know, developmental issues like over the years and, and re experiencing that really helped me put all of this bullshit into perspective, honestly.
Um, Because when you are not worried about the safety of your child, then you have the privilege, really, is the only word for it, to worry about all sorts of other things that are trivial and of no consequence and ultimately don't really matter to the end.
And I think that going through that really helped me put all of this parenting influencer nonsense Into perspective, and it made me care a lot less.
I think it's going to make me care a lot less this time around.
I mean, all I care about is that my kid is healthy and safe.
That's all I care about.
I'm not thinking about how... My OB asked me, do you want to try to have a vaginal birth?
And I was like, Yeah, whatever.
I don't care.
Whatever you think is best.
Whatever you think is going to have the best outcome for me and for my child.
And she was like, okay.
And it's the same with nursing.
I'll probably try it.
I'll probably try to do it again.
But if it doesn't succeed, I'm not going to beat myself up over it like I did last time.
And every parent wants the best for their child.
You know, it's really only the parents who are in a position of extreme privilege who make up these problems as they go along, you know, and make up, manufacture these concerns in their heads.
And I just don't have any patience for that, honestly.
EJ Dixon, thank you so much for taking the time.
It's great to talk to you.
Thank you.
Thank you everyone for listening.
Remember that you can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all of that stuff.
Remember that we have an Early Access series that we're releasing on Patreon.
I want to sign off with this memory.
Alex gave birth by emergency C-section in the morning.
And sometime in the afternoon or evening, it's all a blur to be honest, I had to drive back to the apartment to clean it up and arrange things for the return of mother and baby the next day.
And the apartment was pretty wrecked, not in the beer bottles and empty pizza boxes kind of way, but it was like a tornado had hit a health food store.
There were undrunk cups of herbal tea, special Ayurvedic protein treats made of dates and cashews and ghee and whatever else I'd made.
And they were in crumbles on the couch.
And there was water pooled on the kitchen floor around the big blue rubber blow up birthing pool that was going to be part of the natural experience.
you The water was still in it.
It was cold and a little sad.
And I opened the big plastic box that the pool came in from the midwives and brought out the electric pump for draining it into the sink.
And the box was at that point stuffed with the plastic packaging that everything had been wrapped in for the sanitation theater that's standard for that stuff.
So I plugged in the pump and I started it up and it buzzed and burped the water out into the steel sink.
And then I got out the air pump and attached it and plugged it in and it shriveled up the pool like a plastic prune.
It sucked out all of the air and with it, I think, the strange idea of the natural.
At that point, nothing mattered beyond their safety.
Beyond their feeling love, come what may.
At that point, it seemed like the only thing that was natural in the world was empathy and trying hard and service.
And these things come in so many forms.
And I think you know they're present if the person offered these things feels relaxed and integrated.
