The Mansion of Happiness (8 page)

“Morally pretentious, intellectually obscure, and inordinately long,” the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called
2001
, in a review in
Vogue.
Jay Cocks, a writer for
Time
who had been assigned a feature story about Kubrick, reported that at the appearance of the Star-Child at the first public screening of
2001
, one critic snorted and walked out. The reviews were, Cocks
said, “almost uniformly devastating.”
Time
canceled the feature.
⁵⁹
Renata Adler and
Pauline Kael, two influential reviewers who, to say the least, didn’t often agree, despised it. They were both women. Adler, writing in the
New York Times
, found it extravagantly inane that
2001
, the story of human history, ends with man’s “death and rebirth in what looked like an intergalactic embryo.” Kael, writing for
Harper’s
, called
2001
“monumentally unimaginative”: “Kubrick’s story line—accounting for evolution by extraterrestrial intelligence—is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time.”
⁶⁰
’Twas believed by the critics that he was crack-brained.

Kubrick waved all this aside, dismissing his detractors as “dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound.” And the reviews were far from uniformly devastating.
Life
celebrated the film’s gadgetry and “hard science.”
⁶¹
Audiences, meanwhile, adored it. It was a happening, good to watch while getting stoned, a
different kind of voyage of life:
2001
was, as its ad campaign had it, “the ultimate trip.”
⁶²

Kubrick’s
2001
told the story of the origins of man—without women. Women, meanwhile, were campaigning for equal rights with men, for what they called “personhood.” The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966,
NARAL in 1969. In a speech in Chicago that year,
Betty Friedan said, “There is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we
assert and demand the control over our own bodies.” In 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment, written by
Alice Paul and first introduced to Congress in 1923, passed and went to the states for ratification. Opponents of the ERA, led by
Phyllis Schlafly, supported, instead, a “human life amendment,” first proposed in 1973, eight days after the Supreme Court ruling in
Roe v. Wade
. The ERA was
eventually defeated. The language of personhood was adopted by the
pro-life movement. By the beginning of the twenty-first century,
personhood amendments began appearing on state ballots. A 2011 Mississippi Personhood Amendment read, “The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization.” If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights,
women cannot have equal rights with men. In American political history, this debate goes back only decades, but in the history of ideas, it goes back to a time before almost no one, least of all
William Harvey, could imagine the body politic as female.

“To Us the whole Theatre of the World is now open,” Harvey had written, during the age of discovery. For
Stanley Kubrick, it wasn’t inner space but outer space that his
Discovery
explored, a whole new world. But, really, it was the same place, a world without women. In the space age, the secrets of generation were at last discovered, in a galaxy terribly far away.

A
t the dawn of the twenty-first century, there were some new rules governing what used to be called “mother’s
milk,” or “
breast milk,” including one about what to call it when it’s no longer in a mother’s breast. An explanation, nomenclatural: “expressed human milk” is milk that has been pressed, squeezed, or sucked out of a woman’s breast by hand or by machine, but not by a baby, and stored in a bottle or a jar or, best for freezing, in a plastic bag secured with a twist tie. Matters, regulatory: Could a woman carry containers of her own milk on an airplane? Before 2008, not more than three ounces, because the U.S. government’s Transportation Security Administration classed human milk with shampoo, toothpaste, and Gatorade until a Minneapolis woman heading home after a business trip was reduced to tears when a security guard at LaGuardia Airport poured a two-day supply of her milk into a garbage bin, leading protesting mothers to stage airport “nurse-ins”; Dr.
Ruth Lawrence of the
breast-feeding committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics to tell the press, “She needs every drop of that precious golden fluid for her baby”; and the TSA to reclassify human milk as “liquid medication.”
¹
Could a woman sell her milk on eBay? It had been done and, so far, with no more consequence than the opprobrium of the blogosphere, at least until the Federal Drug Administration decided to tackle that one. Could women share their milk over Facebook? This, too, had been done (it was called “Eats on Feets,” after Meals on Wheels), and, although the Canadian Paediatric Society deemed it inadvisable, what the Centers for Disease Control had to say about it remained to be seen.
²
That agency did, however, provide a fact sheet about “What to Do If an Infant or Child Is Mistakenly Fed Another Woman’s Expressed Breast Milk,” which could happen at day care centers where fridges were full of bags of milk, labeled in smudgeable ink. (The CDC solemnly advised that a switch “should be treated just as if an accidental exposure to other bodily fluids occurred.”) During a nine-hour exam, could a woman take a break to express the milk uncomfortably filling her breasts? No, because the Americans with Disabilities Act did not consider lactation a disability.
³
Could a human milk bank pay a woman for her milk? (Milk banks supply pasteurized human milk to hospitals.) No, because making of human milk a cash cow violated the ethical standards of the
Human Milk Banking Association of North America.
⁴
If a nursing woman drank to excess—alcohol flows from the bloodstream into the mammary glands—could she be charged with child abuse? Hadn’t happened yet, but there had been talk. Meanwhile, women who were worried could test a drop with a product called
Milkscreen; if the alcohol level was too high, the recommendation was: pump and dump.
⁵

An observation, historical: all this seemed so new that people were making up the rules as they went along.
⁶
Before the 1990s, electric
breast pumps, sophisticated pieces of medical equipment, were generally available only in hospitals, where they were used to express milk from women with inverted nipples or from mothers of
premature or low-birth-weight infants too weak and tiny to suck and who needed to be fed milk through a tube snaked down the esophagus. But by the first decade of the twenty-first century, breasts pumps were so ubiquitous a personal accessory, they were more like cell phones than catheters.
⁷
During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Republican vice presidential nominee,
Sarah Palin, told
People
magazine that she had often found herself having to “put down the BlackBerries and pick up the breast pump.”
⁸
In 2010, staffers and newly elected politicians arriving in Washington and looking for a place to pump their milk availed themselves of six “lactation suites” known as “boob cubes.”
The first was opened after then Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi pushed for a pumping station in a room in the basement of the Capitol Building. It was equipped, the Associated Press reported, with “multiline phones, a TV often tuned to C-SPAN, and power outlets for laptops. Women who made calls from a phone in that room found that the caller ID read, ‘infant lactation.’ ”
⁹
In 2011, First Lady
Michelle Obama urged the IRS to give
tax breaks for breast pumps.
¹⁰

Ectogenesis was a still a
science fiction fantasy, the stuff of Haldane and Huxley, but ectolactation was everywhere. There were as yet no Hatcheries, but there were boob cubes in the very halls of government. Strangest of all: not many people seemed to find this freakishly dystopian, merely troubling, or even objectionable.

A treatise, mercantile: Medela, a Swiss company founded in 1961, introduced its first non-hospital, electric-powered, vacuum-operated breast pump in the United States in 1991; five years later it launched the swank Pump In Style. Its sales soon quadrupled. The traffic in pumps was brisk, although accurate sales figures were hard to come by, not least because many people bought the top-of-the-line models secondhand. (Manufacturers pointed out that if you wouldn’t buy a used toothbrush, you shouldn’t buy a used breast pump; but a toothbrush didn’t cost three hundred dollars, and most women figured that, so long as you sterilized the hell out of the thing, it wasn’t unsanitary.) Then there was the swag. “Baby-friendly” maternity wards that had once sent new mothers home with free samples of infant formula began giving out manual pumps: plastic, one-breast-at-a-time gizmos that work like a cross between a straw and a bicycle pump. Walmart sold an Evenflo pump at a bargain. Avent made one “featuring new iQ Technology”; the pitch was that the pump’s memory chip made it smart, but the name also played on well past dubious claims that human milk raises IQ scores.
¹¹
Still swisher, state-of-the-art pumps whose motors, tubes, and freeze packs were wedged into bags disguised to look like black leather Fendi briefcases and Gucci backpacks were a must-have at baby showers; the Medela Pump In Style Metro Model—“the CEO of breast pumps”—was a particular rage; you could pick one up at any department store.

Medela also sold Pump & Save storage bags and
breast shields (a shield
is the hard plastic part of the contraption that fits over the breast; it looks like a horn of plenty). Plug Medela’s no-hands model into your car’s cigarette lighter: pump ’n’ drive. Better yet, pump, drive, ’n’ text: strenuous motherhood was de rigueur. Duck into the ladies’ room at a conference of doctors, lawyers, or professors and, chances were, you’d find a flock of women with matching “briefcases” waiting—none too patiently and, trust me, more than a little sheepishly—for a turn with the electric outlet. Pumps came with plastic sleeves, like the sleeves in a man’s wallet, into which a mother was supposed to slip a photograph of her baby because, Pavlovian, looking at the picture aids “letdown,” the release of milk normally triggered by the presence of the baby, his touch, his cry. Staring at that picture when your baby was miles away: it could make you cry, too. Pumping is no fun—whether it is more boring or more lonesome I find hard to say—but it wasn’t just common; it had become strangely trendy, too, so trendy that even women who were home with their babies all day long expressed their milk and fed it to their babies in a bottle. American women pumped milk like no other women in the world. Behind closed doors, the nation began to look like a giant human dairy farm.

Meanwhile, the evolving rules governing human milk, including a proposed Breastfeeding Promotion Act, made for nothing so much as a muddle. They indulged in a nomenclatural sleight of hand, eliding “breast-feeding” and “feeding human milk.” They were purblind, unwilling to eye whether it’s his mother or her milk that matters more to a baby. They suffered from a category error. Human milk is food. Is it an elixir, a commodity, a right? This question about life and death was, at heart, taxonomical. And, like most questions about life and death, it had been asked before.

Taxonomy follows anatomy:
William Harvey sought the origins of life; the Swedish naturalist
Carolus Linnaeus sorted the kinds of life. Linnaeus’s parents had wanted him to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a priest, but, from boyhood, he loved plants and their quirky names. In 1735, he was twenty-eight and just finishing his study of medicine when he published the first edition of his
Systema Naturae
, in which he proposed a system for classifying and naming all living things. At first, he placed humans in a category called Quadrupedia: four-footed beasts. This was heresy; in Genesis, men are not animals. (Linnaeus, a devout Lutheran, considered
his work to be honoring God’s creation, in that he was deducing, by observation, the divine order of nature.) But even those of Linneaus’s critics who conceded the animality of man averred, none too gently, that people have two feet, not four. Ah, but hands are just feet that can grip, Linnaeus ventured. This proved unpersuasive. By 1758, in a process brilliantly reconstructed by the historian of science
Londa Schiebinger, Linnaeus had abandoned Quadrupedia in favor of a word he’d made up: Mammalia, for animals with milk-producing nipples.

He derived this word from the Latin root
mamma
, meaning breast, teat, or udder.
Mamma
is closely related to the onomatopoeic “mama,” mother, thought to come from the sound a baby makes while suckling. Mammals are mammals and humans are mammals because they make milk. As categories go, mammal is an improvement over quadruped, especially if you’re thinking about what people have in common with whales. But, for a while at least, it was deemed scandalously erotic. (Linnaeus’s classification of plants based on their reproductive organs, stamens and pistils, fell prey to a similar attack. “Loathsome harlotry,” one botanist called it.) More importantly, the name falls something short of capacious: only female mammals lactate; males, in a strict sense, are not mammals. Plenty of other features distinguish mammals from Linnaeus’s five other animal classes: birds, amphibians, fish, insects, and worms. (Tetracoilia, animals with a four-chambered heart, proposed by a contemporary of Linnaeus’s, the Scottish surgeon
John Hunter, was, quite possibly, a better idea.) And if it’s the milk that matters most, why not gather the cetaceous with the human, male and female, under Lactentia: animals whose young suckle?

Linnaeus had his reasons; mostly, they were political. Naysayers might doubt that humans are essentially four-footed (whether on scriptural or arithmetic grounds), but no man born of woman, he figured, would dare deny that he was nourished by mother’s milk. Then, too, while Linnaeus was revising his
Systema Naturae
from the fourteen-page pamphlet he published in 1735 to the two-thousand-page opus of 1758—and abandoning Quadrupedia in favor of Mammalia—his wife was, not irrelevantly, lactating. Between 1741 and 1757, she bore and nursed seven children (two of whom died young). The father of taxonomy was a father of five. He also taught medicine and treated patients—he specialized in syphilis—and lectured and campaigned against the widespread custom of wet-nursing.