This is a guest post from Katie Roiphe, responding to the various critics of her recent DoubleX essay, "My Newborn is Like a Narcotic."

I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that credit for the interesting brouhaha surrounding my last piece belongs to the inventive subtitle writer, and not to me. (To answer some of the comments: No, I am not responsible for the subtitle, nor did I see it until the piece was on the site, which is in no way unusual.) I am, however, a little surprised that people would be so blinded by a flashy subtitle that they would not be able to read the substance of the piece itself: After all, it is the job of a headline to attract attention, not to present a nuanced or subtle analysis. It seems to me that we read too many millions of eye-catching headlines that do not perfectly distill the essence of the piece to take them quite so much to heart. And if people are not going to read past the headline, it would save writers a great deal of time and trouble to admit that now.

I have on occasion written a provocative or inflammatory piece. In fact, I teach a class on the art of polemic at NYU, which begins with Milton's Satan, whom I greatly admire, but this particular riff I viewed in the category of "quiet personal reflection." The one very tiny paragraph on feminism was not central to the argument. I was thinking about how we had come to talk about childcare as work or a profession. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, through Betty Friedan's brilliant The Feminine Mystique, to Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions, feminists have long argued about the arduousness of babies. I don't think this is a particularly controversial or original point: They wrote about the difficulty of child-rearing and they had their reasons. Any political ideology has to collapse the ambiguities and complexities of human experience in order to get things done, and feminism is no different.

To answer some of the other comments: Nowhere in the piece did I tell anyone else how to live. Nowhere did I suggest that my experience of the first days of motherhood was any better, richer, or more interesting than anyone else's. (To me, the addiction metaphor implies a derangement and desperation not entirely to be recommended.) Nowhere in the piece did I attack anyone for having a different viewpoint or experience. (Though frankly one does worry about the fragile commenter: If someone chooses to wear an orange dress are you hurt because of the implied critique of your yellow one?) Nowhere did I say that feminists hate babies. In fact, my own mother was a feminist, and I like to think she liked me.

Tags: katie roiphe; feminism; newborns

Katie Roiphe’s recent essay for DoubleX, on the narcotic effects of new motherhood, has generated quite a bit of heat in the blogosphere, with posts piling up from the New York Times’ "Idea of the Day" blog, from Jezebel, and from the Atlantic’s "Daily Dish," among others. I’ve been trying to keep up with the avalanche of comments on all these sites—and ours—and it’s a task that has proven fascinating and enervating in equal measures.

Yesterday afternoon, Salon’s Broadsheet published a roundtable on Roiphe’s piece. If you can stand to hear a little more on the subject, I highly recommend it—I think it’s the most balanced, thoughtful discussion I’ve come across so far. And the format—six short, self-contained essays—helps clarify and distill some of the thorny issues the piece and the subsequent debate has raised.

Tags: broadsheet, katie roiphe, salon

Here’s one other take on Katie Roiphe’s addiction to her newborn: In addition to the mistake of assuming that all or most “feminists” think X, I think Roiphe has fallen prey to the error of conflating what happens when a woman stops working with the magical experience of having a baby. Which is just to say that the professional experience she’s describing here—of fearing the return to work, of the soggy cognitive skills, of cutting short professional commitments, and of her complete lack of enthusiasm for the impending return to “the great world where people talk and think and write” is precisely what I experienced on my own maternity leaves. But it’s also what I’ve just experienced in the days after my recent vacation to Israel.

Whether you take time off to have a baby, to undergo surgery, or to remodel your house, the act of dropping out of the work world for a while has very real consequences; chief among them being that you just stop caring about work so much. I can look at my own muzzy-headed disinclination to rejoin the world of Big Ideas this week as a consequence of “falling in love”—with the sunsets over Jerusalem; with my family there; with the experience of again caring, full-time, for my sons for a few weeks. And all those things really did happen. But what also happened is what happens to every woman to takes a time-out from a consuming career: perspective. Suddenly the deadlines and the bylines don’t feel all that important. And as mothers we have to learn somehow to toggle back and forth between thinking that work is the only thing that matters, and believing our babies are the only things that matter. On a good day, that only happens about 13 times per hour.

At the risk of suggesting that “feminism” means X, I always thought it meant balancing and juggling a life that may seem to have shrunk down to the size of a onesie, but which is actually much bigger than the life we knew before.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: katie roiphe; feminism; newborns

A guest post from Amy Bloom:

I'm glad that Katie Roiphe is crazy about her baby. I was crazy about my babies, too. Even better, I am still crazy about my children, now that they are adults. I don't fault her for the headline, as I'm sure that was chosen for her. What baffles me is her claim that somehow feminists have failed to acknowledge, in writing, that many lucky mothers love their babies. (We do understand that that is a gift, right? That many mothers find themselves unable to experience that lovely, dopey, mind-altering attachment?) Really? No word on this from Grace Paley, Tillie Olson, Adrienne Rich, Ursula LeGuin, Bronwen Wallace? This seems to be an odd, blank spot in Ms. Roiphe's reading. But not so odd, I guess, if one prefers to read Rebecca West and Virgina Woolf. It is true that there is not so much in literature on the glorious romance with the baby, for the same reason that happy marriages, conflict-free lives, and blissful vacations figure so rarely in literature.

I'm pretty sure that some feminists were keen to point out (since there had been so many thousand years of silence on the subject) that motherhood was harder than lots of nonmothers thought. I'm equally sure that many feminists did—and do—adore their children, and many even wrote about it in the past and blog about it now, for better and worse.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: amy bloom, feminism, katie roiphe, newborns

Like Alison Gopnik, I think the anti-Roiphe choir is a bit off tune. In “My Newborn Is Like a Narcotic,” Katie Roiphe was telling a story—to my mind a fascinating one—about her all-consuming oxytocin high. Absent the subhed, it wasn’t particularly political. I guess you could read Roiphe as demanding that you dump your Yaz and join her in baby-fueled ecstasy, but you could as easily read the piece as a warning that newborns will co-opt your emotional and psychological resources. (If I want to feel like Roiphe, I will indulge in actual narcotics, which are cheaper and have the advantage of being considerably easier to extricate oneself from.)

For now I’m grateful for such an honest rendering of what it's like to radically manipulate one’s hormone levels through child production, and I’d be happy to hear from anyone for whom the experience was different.

Tags: katie roiphe, My Newborn is Like a Narcotic

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.

Tags: katie roiphe, My Newborn is Like a Narcotic