Such a wonderful collection of thoughts, and so many of them strike to the heart of how complex nursing is, and how many varied responses individuals might have in their problems with it. I think there has been great merit in every insight given so far. Personally, what always strikes me, is that the battle ground is centred on who controls a woman's body. We like to think we live in a free and uncensored world, but we live with strict restrictive codes on most things: it's only that they are different restrictive codes from previous ones. I do think we progress slowly and gently, but that we are still liiving in a society that is quite restrictive. Women's bodies is a huge cultural battleground, and even in areas such as the sex industry, where we like to think women are in control and strong and active in their own personal pursuit of income and pleasure through their bodies. However, the reality is that of total exploitation and lack of meaningful control is far a more prevalent model than that of the self assured women in charge. Not to mention that these 'freedoms' are heavily controlled and regulated by law. We live in a society that is obessed with 'the male gaze': a theory of cinema spectatorship from the 1970s, in which a wonderful feminist film writer called Laura Mulvey, pointed out that men always have the controlling gaze in cinema. The man looks, and the women is looked at. In the audience, the male is supposed to identify with the male hero - and want to be the one looking and in charge. The female is supposed to identify with the heroine being looked at, and she must paint her face, and buy clothes, and align her body in a way that it can be looked at by men. Her power is in attracting the gaze upon her. It is passive compared to the power of the man to look and contain her in his gaze. This theory came out at an interesting moment in how pornography changed, again in the 1970s. Previously, porn images with women in them tended to have the woman looking straight at the camera - an active particpant in the taking of her picture, and in terms of looking back at the male admirer. If you look at early last century 'porn' images of vaudevill and burlesque stars, the woman are looking straight at you, via the camera. Very proud and straight forward. In the 1970s, 'Playboy' began to take different sorts of photographs, of women who were pretending they were not being photographed. It was a true voyeur set up - where the camera was a man peeking at a women undressing etc, whilst she was oblivious to his presence. Views of her body were 'stolen' by the male, and there was a marked difference in how women in centrefolds were presented. They began to look away from the camera, look sideways, etc, and not present the bold one-on-one eyeline position. One now generally only finds direct eyeline matching is pornography where the women is being presented not as a sexual object, but as a sexuallly active dominant. On the surface, the women in films now, have little in common with the women in films in the 1970s. However, if you analyse both their role in the narrative, and how they are gazed at, little has changed. A fact quite easily missed in the all the glitz and glamour of the high action films we have today, is that the only significant change in the female's role is she now gets to be intelligent whilst she is both looked at, and handed out as the sexual prize at the end of the narrative to the male hero (as always). I have presented this to many a class of teenagers and adults alike, whilst looking at Trinity in the Matrix, and Lara Croft in the TombRaider films. Everyone is very shocked to see that these supposedly strong female heros are in fact just slightly more physically active, and more intelligent than their predecessors: they are still there to be looked at and captured by the male gaze. Lara Croft could not be more maleable to male fantasy if she tried: she's locked in a computer game where male fingers press buttons to control her every move. Yet part of her fantasy in that she in in control. In the film posters, Lara Croft always looks to one side, and down. Nursing an infant is extremely problematic in this paradigm. For a nursing mother makes two statements that I feel are very difficult for our culture to accept. One, she is not interested in the male looking at her. She has clearly signalled she's not interested in being looked at as a sexual object of desire, and is not at all interested in being 'captured' by him. This is an afront to the male who feels he is in control of looking. It is also very strangely a mixed message to the women also looking on - for as had been commented many times before, it is often older women who get more outraged than men. There is a sub-text here that, to me, suggests that some women see the nursing mother as a competing sexual object - as if the sight of her body will capture _her_ husband's view to the nursing mother. So a competition is entered into, and the aghast women insist this object of her husband's desire is removed from sight. Secondly, she is not only not interested in the people looking at her - male or female - she is soley interested in her child. All her attention is centred on her infant. I feel this goes against both her being there as a male object of desire AND is a double affront in that she has excluded that male from the dynamic she is sharing with the infant. We are scared by infants in this world of ours. We seek to see them as disruptive, ill disciplined and a drain. We constantly talk of how they wreck our lives with their demands and how we must 'train' them to be less disruptive. Somehow, it is a fearful sight, to see a mother so involved in her infant, and so loving of that infant to the exclusion of others. The woman who has said "I'm not interesed in you looking at me, go away" and "I am actually interested in this child, not you"! Cheeky wench! A nursing mother takes control of her own body, and uses it as she sees fit. She rejects the idea that society at large, or the people in the space around her, can control both what she does with her body, and _who she gives it to_. In a world where women gain their status and power by how many men look at her - a nursing mother is a problem. Either she is competing for male gaze, or she is rejecting it utterly. Both positions are problematic for others around her. She is also, as I stated, giving her body over to another - her infant. As a society, we like to think this no longer happens: women no longer give over their bodies to their husbands etc. Yet how many of us have heard the statements about not breastfeeding as the breasts 'belong' to the husband/partner? Giving her breast to her infant appear to be even worse than given it over to her husband, as the child is then the interloper in male power over the wife. How often does our society position children as the thorny problem in the husband/wife relationship? Where the wife is now more concerend with her children than the person she 'should' be concerned with - the male? Therefore I see all the fuss about nursing mothers as a battle about women's bodies: and who is in charge of them. Both physically, and in terms of gaze. From this primal aversion to a women being in control of her own body, and excluding herself from the power of those looking at her, all the other situations already mentioned arise. The mind looks for reasons _why_ it is discomforted by what she's doing, and all the other prejudices and personal issues arise. Hoping this makes some sense... :-) Morgan Gallagher Online Lactaneer Nursing 27 month old infant, with full loving support of that nice male person I'm legally chained too! ;-) _________________________________________________________________ Interest Rates NEAR 39yr LOWS! $430,000 Mortgage for $1,299/mo - Calculate new payment http://www.lowermybills.com/lre/index.jsp?sourceid=lmb-9632-19132&moid=14888 *********************************************** Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html Mail all commands to [log in to unmask] To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or [log in to unmask]) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet or ([log in to unmask]) To reach list owners: [log in to unmask]