Breastmilk: The movie! Love it? Hate it? Please share!

I guess I will start with a quote from the director’s statement on their website:

“In a society that values efficiency, multitasking, and diagnostic solutions to problems, and in which women's roles are constantly changing, how does the practice of breastfeeding, with the slower pace it requires, fit in? Do we use pumps, medicine, and other means to make breastfeeding suit our schedules better, or should we change ourselves? These questions, along with the current state of women's politics, feminism, and reproductive health, made breastfeeding an irresistible subject for me”. http://breastmilkthemovie.com/director.html

 

Personally, I thought the movie was great. I mean just the fact that it was about breastfeeding in any sense made a win in my mind, but it is receiving a lot of criticism for showing breastfeeding in a negative light and being discouraging. Which I suppose is one way to look at it, but I think if you look at it that way you are missing the core message of the film. The point of the movie was to expose the challenges breastfeeding mothers face as a result of social factors and, at least in my opinion, it did a fantastic job doing that. Maybe I wasn’t surprised at the amount of difficulty the mothers in the film had because I have listened to all these issues on my beloved pod casts, and I was very aware of them prior to watching the film. Also, the movie has a major feminist flavor, which I of course love because that is a perspective that I share. 

At the very least the movie is a great conversation starter. There were so many quotes that I loved but here are my favorites:

“Because there’s lots of things that are good for us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we do them. Breastfeeding is one of those things that you have to be ridiculously, you have to be ridiculously competitive to do…There is a certain kind of push, an oomph that goes with breastfeeding, and you know the off chance your child is not going to be fat when he gets older is not going to do it”.

Pubic Health Nurse Patrece Griffith-Murray 

“I’m very much against the nurses rolling out the pump when the mother is 24 hours 48 hours post-partum. Because at that point the mothers don’t have a lot of milk, the have enough, but they don’t have a lot. And so by expressing milk or pumping milk at that particular point the only message they are getting is that I don’t have any milk. So you know to say that the pump tells you how much you are producing, is nonsense, it tells you how much you can pump. That’s not the same thing”.

Jack Newman, MD Founder, International Breastfeeding Center 

 “We as a culture in the United States have decided that publicly, that making mothers feel guilty about their infant feeding methods is wrong. But we are also a culture that has not made it easy for women to be successful in some of their infant feeding choices. So instead of actually making changes, we talk about guilt, we talk about, we talk about how much we care about mothers, we don’t want them to feel guilty but we don’t care enough about them to actually do things to change the possibilities of their  experiences. And so guilt operates as this rhetoric that forestalls change”.

Bernice L. Hausman, PhD 

I also loved the comments that the lesbian couple made about how in America there seems to be a distrust around women's bodies which sends the message that it is better to supplement in order to measure and know for certain how much a baby is getting. They continue to say, "I don’t think it’s statistically possible that the number of people that we met that have just said oh I didn’t have enough milk.” “We have met so many women who didn’t have enough milk”. “It’s just impossible.” I have thought the exact same thing! Which makes me very sad.

As with anything, there were of course some parts of the movie that I didn’t love 100%. I didn't really follow the talk of breasts being interpreted as phallic sometimes, because I don't see them as phallic in any way and I don't get the impression many people do, so I was a little confused about that. And the she completely lost me when she said " maybe it would be better to turn that around and look at the penis as breast-ly". I mean she obviously meant it in a very metaphoric sense, but she still lost me because I can't make that connection in my mind whatsoever. And the second thing was that the couple they interviewed in the bedroom, the guy with the long hair in a bun. I felt like the movie producers played up their "hippieness" a little too much by shooting them in bed, basically in their pajamas. Hopefully I'm wrong but I feel like it might make viewers take them less seriously because they will see them as a bit eccentric. I’m sure the couple are aware of their "hippieness" and value it, and that is awesome. And maybe the film producers thought showing them in that way helped the couple make their point about falling into certain childcare roles. I was just disappointed that it was one of the few times they even mentioned breastfeeding past one year in the film and I felt like it could almost add to the stereotype that only granolas or whatever feed their babies longer than a year, rather than promote the idea that it is completely normal.

I think it would be awesome if they did another sequel like they did the last one, and lucky for them I have already planned out the four sections ;) 

“More Breastmilk”

1.More on the actual unique properties of human milk

2. A deeper look at a successful breastfeeding experience. I think it would be beneficial to see the struggles that breastfeeding moms go through that are pretty common and yet can be overcome by just sticking with it (cluster feeds and nipple soreness for example).

3. More on the benefits and controversies around breastfeeding after a year.

4. A look at breastfeeding in a culture where long term nursing is widely accepted and successful.