I am getting the impression that we are trying out a new "social marketing"
idea for the selling of breastfeeding to the American public--the sexuality
of breastfeeding.  Are we sure that the idea didn't come from the infant
formula and drug industry?  Why do we have to market breastfeeding to the
public?

Breastfeeding, like sex, is a biological drive.  That drive, like sex, is
very much controlled by attitudes and institutional practices of a society.
Like puberty that primes our sexual selves, pregnancy primes the woman for
breastfeeding.  We can deny that biology, we can abstain from sex and we can
can abstain from breastfeeding.  We can intellectualize it and deny it.  But
physically your body was designed to do it.  You can control it, society does
control it.  But they are powerful acts separate and distinct from each other.

Birth and breastfeeding are powerful forces that our new science wants to
control.  Why else this biotechnological drive to clone babies and to invent
a better formula than one that is naturally produced?  Men have always been
envious of women's ability to bring forth life and to sustain it.  Will
equating breastfeeding with sexuality increase the desire to breastfeed?  Or
will it be perverted and distorted by people who truly are afraid to allow
women to experience the power of these life events.

Men in seeking to understand or fathom what birth and breastfeeding is like
may only be able to understand it in the context of sex or sexuality.  But
they are not the same things.  And when we describe them as the same, we do
an injustice to each of those experiences.  Each has its own uniqueness, own
pleasures, and problems.

Should we add to the distortion of women and sex in our society?  Or might we
better show people that breastfeeding is a distinct biological drive.  It is
similiar to sex in that it involves the same hormones but it is not about
helping men and women attach and accept each other (that's sex).  It's about
helping a woman attach, accept and receive a new little person into her life.
 It is nature's way of protecting our young and; when we circumvent it or
reinvent it, we do it at a cost to our society in terms of the emotional,
physical and spiritual health of all people.  Valerie W. McClain, IBCLC

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