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This is a guest post from Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby.
Many DoubleX readers seem incensed by Katie Roiphe’s story, "My Newborn is Like a Narcotic." But Roiphe is absolutely right that the intense love between mothers and newborns is a very neglected subject in both literature and philosophy and yes, also feminist writing. (Compare it to the enormous literature on the profundity of sexual and erotic love.) So it might be helpful to see what the science has to say about Katie’s experience, and to think about what the science means.
I write about this at length in my new book, The Philosophical Baby. In short, the scientific literature shows that the mechanisms behind our love of babies is remarkably similar to the mechanisms involved in sexual love. There are clear hormonal and chemical changes that come with pregnancy, labor, and birth, which affect the way we feel, just as there are with sex. In natural labor and the period following, the body produces large amounts of both oxytocin and endorphins (in fact, they use oxytocin to induce labor). It’s too simple to call oxytocin the “bonding” chemical, but there is a lot of evidence that it plays a role in close attachment, trust, and love. If you give people a whiff of oxytocin they’re more likely to cooperate in a game. Endorphins are the natural chemicals that are mimicked by drugs like opium and morphine. (I remember thinking as I held my own first newborn and the flood of warmth and happiness overcame me, “Gee, if this is what opium is like, I’m sure glad I never tried it.”)
But it's important to say, also, that the relationship between the chemicals and experience is always a two-way street. The chemicals can induce the experience, but just having the experiences that go along with love—close attachment, trust, caregiving, kissing, touch— can themselves make the chemicals appear. It’s as true to say that love leads to oxytocin as to say that oxytocin leads to love. So nonbiological caregivers, just by close contact and intimacy with babies, can end up with brain states that are very similar to those of pregnancy and birth.
Of course, all this is subject to tremendous individual variation, like every other human phenomenon. I have to say that when people respond to a description like Katie’s by saying, “Oh, I never felt that, so it must all be a big patriarchal conspiracy, or just modern parental narcissism,” it’s analogous to someone reading all the great sexual love poems and saying, “Gee, I had sex once, even a couple of times, and it wasn’t like that at all. Actually it was kind of icky, and I didn’t even really like the guy much. So all this stuff about erotic transport must be some big antifeminist propaganda campaign. And even if its true, they shouldn’t really talk about it because it’ll make people who’ve had unsatisfying sex feel bad."
From an evolutionary perspective, all this makes sense. One of the absolutely crucial parts of the human evolutionary program is the exceptionally long dependence and extended helplessness of human babies. Our babies depend on us for much longer than those of any other species and they require a particularly large investment of adult care. Arguably, this long immaturity is crucial for many other distinctively human capacities—our capacity for technology and culture for instance.
In fact, it’s likely that human sexual love itself is related to—is even an evolutionary consequence of—our love for infants. Humans go in for what biologists call “social monogamy”—strong bonds and ties between sexual partners—much more than our closest primate relatives, the great apes. In some ways we’re more like penguins and swans, other species that require a great parental investment, than like chimps. (The bad news, or maybe not so bad, is that it turns out that social monogamy doesn’t mean sexual monogamy for any species, even for swans, though we don’t know if they feel guilty or bitter about it.) And it’s at least plausible that this is also the result of our exceptional parental investment.
In our current culture, there are lots of forces that play against it. For most of history, with big extended families and close communities, most people had lots of chances to both witness and practice caregiving emotions well before they had children themselves. We know that plays a big role in human experience—if you’d never dated, or made out, or closely watched other people who were obviously in love, you probably wouldn’t have the same experience of sexual love. The medicalization and isolation of much modern child-bearing plays a role too.
An important point, from a feminist perspective, is that the emotions of closeness and attachment and caregiving aren’t restricted at all to biological mothers, but are shared by fathers and everyone else—siblings, grandmothers, babysitters, and neighbors who help take on the big task of human caregiving. Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy has done exceptional serious work on this that’s summarized in her new book Mothers and Others.
But here’s the crucial point: Does all this science mean that the intense feelings that Katie describes so well, and that I and many other mothers and caregivers have shared, are just an illusion? A narcotic, as Katie says? A way for evolution to get us to do what it wants? And the answer, as in the very parallel case of sexual love, is not at all. Everything about us is the result of the activity in our brains that is shaped by evolution. My experience of the table in front of me is as much a result of the chemicals in my brain and the forces of evolution as my experience of intense maternal or sexual love. But that doesn’t mean that the table itself is an illusion. Most of the time evolution really does design us so our experience tracks important and real parts of our condition. Poets and thinkers have long recognized that the particular chemical, biological, and evolutionary phenomenon of human sexual love, with all its absurdities, can put us in touch with something genuinely transcendent and significant. My favorite example is WH. Auden’s beautiful poem “Lullaby:”
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
Since, as Katie points out, so few of history's famous thinkers and poets have been mothers, the intense ordinary swoon we feel about our babies has been neglected. But I think that we sing Auden’s lullaby quite as much to our children as to our lovers.
Photograph of a mother and baby by Photodisc/Getty Images.
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The NYT’s Arts Beat blog reported this morning that Allison Silverman, the executive producer of The Colbert Report, is stepping down from her post, apparently rather suddenly, at the start the show's three-week vacation. The Times cites a source as saying that, more or less, Silverman is burned out by the unforgiving schedule of putting together the daily fake news broadcast.
Until I saw Silverman speak at a panel on political humor last year, I’d always maintained that, although I tune into The Daily Show more regularly than The Colbert Report, Colbert himself is a funnier person than Stewart. She was so impressive, though, that I began to wonder if the more apt declaration was that he “has a funnier persona”—one which, in no small part, is bolstered by his crack behind-the-scenes team.
Silverman’s often trotted out as an example in articles seeking to refute the Christopher Hitchens “women aren’t funny” thesis. (She was asked about his infamous Vanity Fair piece on the subject at the panel I attended, and answered that it didn’t bug her: “It was just an old man yelling at cars from his yard.”) Indeed, in a bit of redress, even Vanity Fair sat down with her to talk about being a funny woman, yielding this nugget on how Silverman thinks “status shifts”—a change in who controls the power in a scene—inform comedy:
It’s not funny to see someone powerless being mocked. I think most people react against that, actually—unless they are a particularly cruel audience. What’s much more fun is to see someone who does have power, and is in the dominant position, become exposed.
This is apparent in much of what The Colbert Report mocks—and is, of course, the principle underlying why last winter’s moaning about how Stewart and Colbert wouldn’t be funny now that Obama’s in office was so misplaced. (Luckily, too, the Colbert/Stewart definition of power is both more nuanced and wide-ranging than that.) But if you take Silverman’s last sentence totally out of context—and I will!—it describes what we’re about to see: Colbert becoming a bit exposed. Will he be quite as good without Silverman as his Cyrano, or has her role been exaggerated?
Photograph of Allison Silverman by Ethan Miller/Getty Images.
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On the New York Times' Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin brings up an issue that seems to get play every late August/early September: whether or not high schools should begin later to cater to teens' natural sleep cycles. I say: Get out of bed, adolescent lollygaggers!
Pro-late-starters say that teens are involved in fewer car accidents when school starts later because they get more sleep, and also that they can absorb material better because they are less tired. These are not insignificant benefits. However, the reason a lot of these kids are so exhausted is because they're staying up far too late. I feel like a geezer saying this, but when I was a teen, I was able to wake up at 6:30 every morning, precisely because I went to sleep by 10 or 11 every night. I was really tired by the end of the day, and so didn't stay up 'til all hours dialing up AOL. I also walked 10 miles to school every day on broken glass. But seriously: If teens are going to school later and later, they won't train their bodies to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Training their bodies is something that will be useful to them in adult life, not just in teen world. Parents out there: prove me wrong—do you wish your adolescents started school later? Or are you happy to shove 'em out the door at 7 a.m.?
Photograph of a sleeping teen by Photodisc/Getty Images.
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Actually, not one enraged commenter on yesterday's NYT article about the possibility of the CDC recommending circumcision as an HIV preventative raised that question. But the fierce opposition that still surrounds the HPV vaccination for girls centers around exactly that. If both procedures might make unprotected sex marginally safer, why is the conversation so different?
I'm not actually opposed to the CDC recommending circumcision—especially since the main effect of the recommendation would be that an always-optional procedure would remain optional, but be once again covered by Medicaid. Circumcision appears to reduce the risk of contracting the HIV virus through sex with an infected (female) partner by about 60 percent. The HPV vaccine prevents "some types" of genital warts which "may" cause cervical cancer. Neither's a slam dunk, but both might make a night of unprotected sex a less risky proposition in the long term. And teens claim to consider the risks of HIV when making the decision about whether to have sex, while HPV remains low on their radar. So it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that being circumsized—along with a nice public health campaign promoting the reduction in risk—might make a teen boy feel even less mortal. But it didn't come up.
Granted, circumcision is an actual procedure—one I've watched twice, and one that's not accurately described by the word "snip." And we're talking about babies, not preteens, so the whole issue of sex seems less imminent. But still, a vaccine and a procedure with a shared goal of making unsafe sex just a little safer each caused a small but vocal minority to rise up in very different forms of protest. Girls might have more sex. Boys might feel less pleasure. Could the difference be any starker?
Photograph of a teenage couple by Stockbyte/Getty Images.
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We all know that celebrity gossip can wreck your brain, but apparently it can also wreck your computer. Cybercriminals use our insatiable lust for celebrity minutiae to lure surfers to malicious websites. And according to the security tech company McAfee—which just released its third annual report on the riskiest celebrities in cyberspace—Jessica Biel is the interweb’s most dangerous famous person.
Fans who Google “Jessica Biel” apparently have a one in five chance of ending up on a website that’s tested positive for threats like spyware, phishing, or viruses—making her more dangerous than Beyoncé or Jessica Simpson, and far more dangerous than last year’s winner, Brad Pitt, who's currently hanging out at #10.
Team Aniston, rejoice: Your girl won this contest—Jen rates #3, while Angelina Jolie ties with Megan Fox for #8.
(Via the AP.)
Photograph of Jessica Biel by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.
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Nina, like you, I love a good revenge story, especially one as empowering as MC Roxanne Shanté’s story. I was struck not by her awkwardness in the video (I actually thought she was pretty poised for a 14 year old), but by how innocent and unsophisticated hip hop videos seemed back then. I mean, she was fully clothed and in an argyle sweater, no less. Her pants look to be either velvet or leather, but tasteful. There was no skin showing. No provocative rump-shaking. No cursing or bragging about her sexual prowess. That video would have little trouble earning a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. It was like the anti Lil’ Kim, whose videos and images speak for themselves.
The music industry is littered with one hit wonders like The Real Roxanne, young hip-hop artists who got shafted in complicated record deals that solely benefit the record companies. Never mind clauses promising to pay for college (who woulda thunk?), many of the artists “lucky” enough to even get signed by record companies see pennies in profits, not the millions they routinely brag about in their rap songs.
The idea to put an education clause in Roxanne's record contract was brilliant. I wonder if a smart and caring representative, a relative, or an agent requested it, or if the record company just threw it in as a bone. If the person behind it was simply looking out for her long-term interests, they deserve big props. (Maybe Roxanne can repay them with a few free counseling sessions.)
It would be really poetic if that representative was a woman like Marguerita Grecco, the dean at Marymount Manhattan College, who helped force Warner Music to pay for Roxanne's education and in the process put her on a life path that most people don't expect of a single, teenage mother from the projects. A doctorate degree in psychology from Cornell University? (Can she get a whoop, whoop?)
I loved Roxanne’s quote in The Daily News story: "I told Dean Grecco that either I'm going to go here or go to the streets, so I need your help.”
Grecco's response? “ ‘We're going to make them pay for this.’ ”
And pay they did.
Image is a screenshot from MC Roxanne Shanté’s music video.
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