I don't have a URL or paper name yet, but I will get these. The author is
Julie Burchill, a controversial collumnist. A British friend forwarded me
the article which apparently ran yesterday in a major newspaper...
Breast-feeding? It sucks!
Next week is National Breast-feeding Week, and the nipple police will be
out in force. Julie Burchill tells them to back off
Wednesday May 12, 1999
Nipples, nipples everywhere - and not a drop to drink. For the British
celebrity femme, getting one's tits out for one's career has been one of
the stranger developments of 90s life. But at the same time, British women
have remained obdurate in the face of repeated requests to get their tits
out for their babies.
<snipped out several long paragraphs in here>
ends with:
'But it's what breasts are FOR!' the breast-feeding lobby will bleat when
all other arguments fail. But as Australian writer Susan Maushart says in
her brilliant new book, The Mask Of Motherhood: 'Women discover that
breast-feeding can be technically tricky, physically painful and/or
fatiguing, and emotionally draining . . . We forget that while, as homo
sapiens, we still possess mammalian equipment, we are no longer
repositories of mammalian instinct, any more than we experience labour like
the family cat. Any woman who has not nonchalantly consumed her own
afterbirth should not expect to breast-feed instinctively. Yet we do
expect. If it was not so insane, it would be hilarious.' Animal mothers,
those model breast-feeders, also eat their young and breed with them, so
it's obvious that nature doesn't always know best. Also, declaring that
breasts are 'for' breast-feeding is dangerously essentialist and could
easily become reactionary. Following this logic, a vagina is there 'for' a
penis (and vice versa) - where does this leave lesbians? The fact is that
we are all, as humans, far more than our biology - and in the case of
women, we have become what we are by conquering our biological selves. This
is why our lives amount to something more than having a child a year
between the ages of 14 and 40 then dying, exhausted, at 45.
If a woman is happy to live as little more than a cow, she is free to do
so. But she should not attempt to entrap her more modern sisters into her
musty web. If feminism is about anything, it is about the fact that what
suits one woman may not suit another. Those who do not suit breast-feeding
should not be made to feel guilty or failures; this, more than anything,
will get their relationship with their babies off to an extremely bad
start. To subdue and control women for men was wicked; to do so on behalf
of babies is almost as bad. Nipple police, back off!
NancyH
Nancy Holtzman RN BSN MOM
Great Beginnings New Mothers Groups and
Boston Bestfeeds
mailto:[log in to unmask]
***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
|
