What is a free choice?
Contemplating the limits of body modification
A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze/ Margaret Atwood
What is a ‘free choice’? This is something I’ve thought about a lot in relation to childbirth, in practical terms because if I had a quid for every time a person has told me I’m judging women’s choices by writing in positive terms about home birth and breastfeeding, I’d be very rich indeed. The most recent Amazon review on my book The Positive Birth Book is a good example, the reader declares I am ‘biased against elements of choice’, because the book ‘pushes home births and breastfeeding’ and needs a more ‘neutral overtone’.
I’ve thought long and hard about this - in particular when I revised the Positive Birth Book for the new edition - but I kept coming back to the same conclusion - being biased towards something that all the evidence supports as a really fantastic, healthy, positive choice, isn’t really ‘bias’ - it’s giving the facts. If I write something about kids car seats, for example, you wouldn’t expect me to tell you that forward facing, rear facing etc, all the different choices are equal. You’d want me to say - do the best you can in your budget and your circumstances, they are all good choices, but the evidence shows that this particular one is best. The evidence shows that home birth is the best choice for low risk women who want a straightforward vaginal birth. It also shows that breastfeeding is the best choice for women and babies - if it’s what women want to do. So yes, I am biased towards helping those women who want to make those choices to actually have the freedom to do so, rather than being held back by what is often a tidal wave of misinformation.
The choices we make are always influenced and informed by our culture. Most Western women give birth on a bed on their back, not because this is the best place for them, but because ‘that’s how it’s done’. If you put the information out there that, in fact, birth on a bed on your back is actually not the best choice (it narrows your pelvic opening, it means you have to work against gravity, it makes you feel less powerful etc), then you will get people pushing back on that and telling you that it’s ‘down to personal choice’. But how much of a free choice is a woman really making if, when she goes into labour, she heads to hospital, and is taken to a room with a fudging great big bed at the centre, and is told to ‘hop up’ on it.
This week I’ve been deep in chapter 2 of the book I’m writing and my focus in this chapter, as some of you know, is body image. As usual I’ve been down a variety of rabbit holes in my research - beauty standards, the male gaze, vulva power, cosmetic surgery, female genitalia on Greek statues, FGM, the history of pubic hair, anorexia - no wonder my word count is still only about 4000 of the 8000 I’m aiming for! There is so much to consider when you really start to pull at the threads of what happens to each woman when she stands in front of a mirror. And yes, that woman then makes ‘free choices’ about how to modify her body in a way that her current culture - and in particular, the men in it - find appealing, or perhaps she will choose to reject all that. Either way, her choices are often being made in relation to the male gaze whether she likes it or not. In the current draft of the book (eagle eyed readers will one day be able to see if this makes it to publication!), I have quoted Margaret Atwood from her novel The Robber’s Bride:
“Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
People make ‘free choices’ that are worthy of scrutiny and debate. Cosmetic labiaplasty is another topic I’ve been learning about this week, and also ‘bleaching’. Both of these current trends apparently have their roots in pornography - the goal for some women being a ‘Barbie-like’ vulva - hairless, the labia trimmed so all is ‘neat’, and all one colour thanks to the ‘bleaching’ treatment. It’s every woman’s free choice to do this to her body, but like every free choice it wouldn’t exist without the cultural ‘wallpaper’ that suggests to each new generation of women what particular form of perfection the male gaze - or even the ‘man inside’ - might approve of. Does this make it a truly free choice? If you listen to Hibo Wardere tell the story of her own FGM, you will hear that she wanted it, and her mother did it willingly, because it is a part of her culture. It’s also, arguably, a choice made freely. And unarguably, it’s a very bad choice indeed.
With all of this swirling around my head I saw the new advert for Burberry featuring a woman with visible mastectomy scars, not because she had had breast cancer, but because she identified as trans. I am an infrequent poet, a once a year kind of poet, and I make no claims to being any good at it, but I do absolutely love poetry and the
form it gives to human thought. Somehow, laying in bed awake at about 6am, I started to write something, and then I wrote a bit more in the carwash after the school run, and then I finished it at home when I should have been getting on with my book writing. I’ve published it on my instagram and I’m going to publish here in the Book Forge in a separate post so that people who want to share it can do so without the above waffle to distract them. You can read it here.
I’d also like to share it here for you as the natural conclusion to this week’s thoughts.
Pic credit Burberry. (I think they took the post down)
Affirmation
The glorification of women's self-harm and mutilation
A state sanctioned experimentation on the female population
Slicing away at our power of creation
A handbag sale for every exploitation
We've seen it all before
The heroin chic, the 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels', the thinspiration
Girl, it would be better if there were less of you
Purge your curves and get validation
A new explanation for each generation
But always in relation to the male observation
Marry well, fit the dress, don't be too much.
Take up less space. Smile more. Watch your reputation.
Menstruation, gestation, lactation,
A leaky old mamma is no-one’s aspiration
A nip, a tuck, a slice; it’s quite the affirmation
And cash flows rich from every laceration.
The scars are neat and clean, a simple operation
A fresh solution for an age-old exploitation
Our flesh is your domain, at any cost
Your profits rise as parts of us are lost.
Next week I hope to launch a new Give Birth like a Feminist podcast as well as finish Chapter 2! Wish me luck! Until then, thanks for reading, and please consider upgrading your subscription to paid to support my work, Milli x
When you are looking at Anorexia, Dr Sir William Gull in the 19th century was tbe man who coined the term and also worked out a way to treat patients with it. I have copies of his notes.
In terms of body free choice..,or the concept that a person can do whatever they like to their own body due to personal body autonomy, I would say there are limits.
When body modification goes over the line into self harm, wherher direct by the individual or via aiding, abetting, actively involved by a third party, civilised society should be saying no. That No should be interventions to protect the at risk person from themselves, putting limits on the type of modifications available, sectioning if need be.
Those who suffer from anorexia are not encouraged to lose weiggt....because it is self harm.
Young people cannot have tattoos until 18.
Most piercings are nit permitted before 16 or 18 except ear lobe.
Most cosmetic surgeries purely for vanity reasons, are not permitted before 18.
Maybe some *cosmetic* surgeries such as genital surgeries of *any kind* but particularly those specifically for "trans" such as mastectomies, penile inversion, fake penis etc should be utterly banhed as there is no clinical need for such surgeries and a whole lot of harm.
There are limits on bodily autonomy....self harm is that line.
Absolutely this Milli. When I was working on an advanced degree, I wrote a paper comparing and contrasting FGM and breast augmentation, which I consider to be harms that women willingly perpetrate on themselves at the behest of the male gaze. Even just the one in their head as Margaret Atwood memorably wrote about.
Informed consent (which is more lip service than reality in many health care settings) requires giving information to people that they may not want to hear. I had a father to be confront me in antenatal classes because in his mind I "was biased against epidurals in labour". Well, actually I am against their routine use because of the potential harms they can precipitate. If you are going to choose to have an epidural, the time to do your thinking about this is before you are screaming in the midst of a contraction; this is not an informed choice situation, although everyone in the room will pretend otherwise. All I do is give women the facts to think about, and then support them in whatever choice they make.