For those of you who developed a fondness for Julie Burchill over her article
during UK's National Breastfeeding Week in May: it was obviously too much to
hope that she could
leave the WWF stuff alone:
(from part way through the column in today's paper)
Until this week, sunbathing was Bad and breastfeeding Good, so imagine my
surprise to read that, once again, it's all change in the crazy world of pop
science. It gives me no satisfaction to know that all those ferocious lactators,
who wrote me evil letters in their own breast milk, claiming that I would go to
hell for opposing breastfeeding, are now panicking because, it turns out,
they've been feeding Junior huge whacks of pesticides, lead, arsenic, mercury
and sex-changing chemicals along with Nature's Best. No wonder you see kids who
could open beer cans with their teeth still hanging on the nipple: they're
addicts.
The WorldWide Fund For Nature last week published a study identifying more than
350 pollutants in breast milk, with two-month-old babies regularly receiving 42
times the safe human level of dioxin, the chemical involved in the Belgian food
scare. We bad mothers, sitting by swimming pools writing self-adoring novels, on
the other hand, are apparently soaking up enough vitamin D to protect ourselves
from putative heart attacks, while at the same time giving our mental health a
massive boost. I never doubted it.
There has not been a society on Earth that has not felt the need to control and
process women. Religious and intellectual rationales for doing so have
collapsed, at least in the west. And here, health education has stepped in: no
longer "It's bad!" but "It's bad for you!" is the message women now receive
about everything remotely enjoyable. It's still scolding - but it's scolding in
a caring way, as Dame Edna might say.
How enlivening, then, to hear that selfish, narcissistic sunbathing has
benefits, and self-sacrificing, exhausting breastfeeding drawbacks. Insofar as I
have any philosophy of life left, it might best be summed up in an old black
American phrase: "Don't trust Whitey", Whitey being, in this instance,
male-devised moral strictures of any kind. There comes a point, as Valerie
Solanas said, when any decent, fun-loving, self-respecting woman just has to say
NO to everything expected of her, on principle, and set about creating her own
moral universe. That's what I'll be doing by my pool this summer. I'll be sure
to let you have the first peek when it's finished.
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******
Sigh.
Magda Sachs
Breastfeeding Supporter, BfN, UK
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