This Dark Matter
The next wave of feminism is about shining a light on what has been hidden, finding ways to reveal this Dark Matter and bring it to light
“But I’ve talked enough about myself, why don’t you talk about me for a bit?”
The theme of this years’ Photography festival Recontres d’Arles was Geopolitics, Transhumanism, Revolts, Utopias. There were exhibitions about men who thought they were Jesus, men who wanted to become robots, men who were fighting wars, starting wars, being killed by other men for opposing war. 80% of the exhibitions were by men and many of the exhibitions by women were also about men.
Incredibly the subject of Geopolitics, Transhumanism, Revolts, Utopias was all explored without the mention of infertility, parenthood, childhood, childrearing & birth. The formidable curatorial powers of the team in Arles saw fit to create exhibition after exhibition from an almost exclusively male perspective.
The Dark Ages
Despite hundreds of years of advancement, with the scientific capabilities of CERN and other international joint projects researching impenetrable questions of the Universe, it would seem we are still in the Dark Ages when it comes to anything connected to that ultimate mystery: birth. When it comes to women’s bodies, we have a blind spot. We simply do not (cannot) look.
Now that I am involved in a breastfeeding project I notice how often breastfeeding is left off the agenda. In issues related to the environment, public health, global poverty, breastfeeding is not mentioned. The Government have a new policy for preventing childhood obesity? Strategies for reducing plastic waste in drinks ? No mention. These are all Big Budget affairs but in both areas but breastfeeding isn’t mentioned: this free, direct from source, nutritionally individualised, globally available, preventative medicine is confined to invisibility and silence.
A Fringe Thing
One explanation for this oversight could be the close ties photography shares with journalism. Journalism is inexorably engaged in a news cycle that favours sensationalism over the boring hum drum of daily oppression.
When we began reporting about international affairs in the 1980s, we couldn’t have imagined writing this book. We assumed that the foreign policy issues that properly furrowed the brow were lofty and complex, like nuclear proliferation….Back then, the oppression of women was a fringe issue, the kind of worthy cause the Girl Scouts might raise money for…” (1)
The issues that are specific to women and girls are often everyday, banal, accepted realities that seem never to be shaken because nobody bothers to address them. They are not exciting, don’t involve big weapons or posturing politicians, just the day to day sorrows that we silently swallow.
A day after returning from Arles I went to an announcement of the results of an experiment by the Parenting Science Gang into the contents of breast milk. The Parenting Science Gang is an awesome example of Citizen Science and hundreds of women had travelled across the country to donate their breastmilk for this experiment at Imperial College, overseen by Dr Natalie Schenker of the Human Milk Foundation. The importance and relevance of this work has implications for global health yet there are just a couple of dozen people in the room.
Only one of them is a man: Simon who conducted the results was surrounded by women, babies, boobs. It was excellent! He explained to us that in any experiment there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
Simon was able to tell us that there are 6,900 compounds in breast milk. We don’t know what they all are yet. These compounds are present at all age of child but the content can be seen to vary widely per sample. We don’t know what brings about the change. He showed us graphs and maps of the mind-boggling variety of content, the extent to which it is individualised to each child, and the questions it raises for more research.
When Simon used the same analysis to test a brand of Infant Formula the results were a big surprise. On one side we saw 6900 compounds of breastmilk, spread out across a map like an unchartered landcscape, a celestial sphere, a complex mystery. On the other side (Infant Formula) we saw a small collection of dots. It was symphony and a nursery rhyme, a novel and a verse. The complexity of breast milk and the range of complexity, varying inexplicably with each sample (not, as was previously thought, with age) was the biggest take-away discovery.
Everything that is wrong with the world and everything that is right with the world was right there in the room at Imperial College. Babies were crawling everywhere and at times we struggled to hear what he had to say above the roars of infants. Some of these women now sat and heard what they had always believed to be true: namely that breast milk is impossible to replicate. It cannot be made in a factory.
No industrial process in the world could ever replicate the sheer breath-taking variety and range of the samples. Are the differences we see in these breast milk results to do with genetic modifications, tailored to the child? Are they due to diet or sickness or other individualised needs? And without this food, this potential medicine how do our bodies adapt?
There are still so many unknown unknowns, Simon said. So much Dark Matter.
Are you Still Breastfeeding?
This is the incredulous question faced by mothers feeding toddlers from GPs, friends, family, people on the bus….So the PSG decided to answer this question: what is actually in breastmilk we produce for toddlers? is it true it is just comfort? On Tuesday we heard the answer from Simon and it is resoundingly NO.
Women who don’t breastfeed report feeling judged, isolated. Women who do breastfeed feel judged, isolated. Especially if they continue beyond six months (the WHO recommendation is 2 years).
Because breastfeeding is only mentioned to women within the context of ‘having a baby’. Everyone in the medical profession agrees that women ‘should’ breastfeed. But their attempts to reinforce this message to new mothers only without any significant cultural shift in terms of visibility of breastfeeding and/or community education into the complexity of breastfeeding issues means women feel impossibly pressured from every side. They literally can do no right when it comes to breastfeeding. hence the anger felt on all sides of this polarized ‘debate’.
For Richer for Poorer
To summarise the importance of the findings, Simon said, it concerns “All people, everywhere, always”
Most women who return to work switch to formula on the basis of a generally held view that there is no benefit to breastfeeding after six months. But the initial findings from the PSG experiment suggest that age is not the determining factor in milk change.
Infant Formula is a huge global industry. China alone turned over £27 billion in 2014. George Kent from the International Breastfeeding Journal, quotes a typical family in developing countries to spending half of their monthly income on infant formula (2). With a lack of scientific evidence to prove the contrary, families are switching to formula from breastfeeding because of cultural and economic pressures that have nothing to do with clinical evidence. And they are growing markedly poorer as a result.
Infant Formula is marketed based on the age of the child, but Simon also found that Infant Formula also changes very little. Should this finding prove to be true in terms of the content of all Infant Formula brands, then the legal advertising of infant formula would need to be readdressed as the scientific basis for advertising formula.
These results from this Citizen experiment have implications for the whole world.
Millions more pounds are needed to provide answers to these urgent questions. According to a study by The Lancet, breastfeeding could prevent up to 800,000 infant deaths per year. (3) That staggering figure is double the total number of estimated civilian deaths in the Syrian war so far. (4) We know a lot about this war. We see it on the news, in newspapers. In Arles there were fantastic exhibitions on the subject.
But I came out of the exhibitions in Arles wondering, where is this other everyday tragedy? Why don’t we see it? How many PhotoBiennials have covered the subject of war? If suffering and death are not ‘news’ they are ignored.
The Next Wave
Perhaps this is why women of the world are getting impatient with the systems that purport to speak for them. Breastfeeding, like birth and pregnancy is Dark Matter. It is a known unknown, left silently on the sidelines of agendas that purport to tackle the big issues of our time: health, waste, water, political freedom, because it is seen as a ‘woman’s issue’ and therefore trivialised.
What I saw in that room was the next wave of Feminism. Women who had achieved education, equality won by the last generation in order to address the next set of questions. Women with babies strapped to them, asking complex scientific and data questions. I watched these women, looked at the data and saw the fragile potential of new answers.
Women are still fighting. It is a fight for access to the tools, the systems of power that determine the direction of the human race. It is a fight for love, for the environment, for social cohesion, for health, for common sense.
Once I thought that equality meant equal rights to jobs. Now I know it means the power to decide the question that is to be asked.
It is a freedom that will never be willingly given, simply because the weight of history is against us and we are pulling against hundreds, if not thousands of years of global history, religion, tradition and accepted truths.
Everywhere women struggle to be heard, to be taken seriously especially when they address issues outside of the ‘Grand Narratives’ that determine relevancy, validity, seriousness.
Blindingly obvious questions are not being asked, important answers are not being heard because either it has not occurred to us to ask them, or because we have not yet found a language in which to communicate them.
Until the ‘liberated’ women of the world take hold of the purse strings of government, the decisions of law, the agendas of education, the mouthpiece of Culture, the staggering cost of global gender inequality will grow.
The next wave of feminism is about shining a light on what has been hidden, finding ways to reveal this Dark Matter and bring it to light.
by Lisa Creagh, First published at www.lisacreagh.com, July 2018
Footnotes:
- Half the Sky by Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, Hachette Digital 2010 p7 Introduction
- Child feeding and human rights George Kent International Breastfeeding Journal volume 1, Article number: 27 (2006)
- Quoted by George Kent in the report above: Coriolis. Infant Formula Value Chain. Auckland, New Zealand: Coriolis; 2014. http://nzpecc.org.nz/media/f3c9cc3577fc96acffff80caffffd502.pdf.
- Source: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/syria
- Half a Sky, loc 128–130
- Half a Sky, loc 159
- For more information about breastfeeding in the UK and to see Simon talking about his research, take a look at this excellent Dispatches documentary: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/on-demand/68508-002
