>Things that are necessary for life feel good

The above statement is not accurate.  This isn't the way natural selection
and evolution work.  Anything that helps get an individual's genes into the
next generation will be selected for, whether or not it feels good.  Any
behavior, whether pleasurable for the individual or painful for the
individual, will be selected FOR if it results in more copies of the genes
for that behavior surviving into the next generation.  And any behavior,
even if it feels good, will be selected AGAINST if it results in fewer
suviving offspring, and therefore fewer copies of the genes for that
behavior surviving into the next generation.

>so it’s reasonable that nature has put a great deal of pleasure into
> >suckling a baby to ensure survival of the species.

The above, likewise, is absolutely not true, for the same reason.  If this
argument were true, then breathing would feel great.  It doesn't.  It
doesn't feel like anything.  Same as breastfeeding for most people -- it
isn't painful, it isn't pleasurable, it is just something you do.  I discuss
this issue at some length in Chapter 7 (Beauty and the Breast) of
Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives.

>for women to a one of biological fulfillment.  While men have only one
>interpersonal sexual relationship, intercourse, women have two,
>intercourse and breastfeeding

Ack.  Please!!!!!  Breastfeeding is not a "sexual relationship."  Sex is how
you get pregnant.  Breastfeeding is how you nurture and provide food and
medicine and emotional comfort to your child.  It isn't sex.  The failure to
distinguish these two very different behaviors will only lead to much grief
and confusion and to even more women being accused of sexually abusing their
children by breastfeeding than already get accused of such.

All pleasure is not sexual pleasure.  It isn't sexual when I get pleasure
from my mother giving me a foot rub with peppermint foot lotion.  It isn't
sexual when I get pleasure from hugging my friend when she's had a bad day.
It wasn't sexual when I got pleasure from a massage during chemo from Kerri
Bundy (LactNet member).  When mothers feel physical pleasure from
breastfeeding, it ISN'T SEXUAL.

Sigh.

I am now climbing down off my soapbox.  No personal offense meant to the
person who posted the post I am responding to, but this is one of my pet
peeves and I could not let it go un-challenged on LactNet.

Kathy Dettwyler





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