here's the article that has me a little annoyed and perhaps flabbergasted at people's stupidity
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/05/22/breastfeeding_poster/index.html
Toddler pretending to breastfeed shocks dozens!
"Distasteful, inappropriate and crude." That's how some people are describing a poster hanging in a hospital near Manchester, England. The grandmother of a patient there calls it "shocking" and "disgusting." A health care assistant at the hospital calls it "highly offensive."
What's the oh-so-scandalous image? A picture of a little girl pretending to breastfeed her dolly.
The poster, placed in a children's ward to promote Breastfeeding Awareness Week, reads, "It's normal. Children copy their mothers. Teenagers do it! Celebrities do it!" Now, I doubt the folks behind the poster will be winning any awards for clever copywriting -- or design, for that matter -- but given that the image in question shows a fully clothed child doing nothing remotely sexual, the outrage is absurd. And tiresome. (And disturbing, in the case of the health care assistant who's offended.) How hard is it to understand that breastfeeding is about nourishing a child, not exhibitionism? We're still hung up on this? Really?
Yep. Australian feminist blog Hoyden About Town has a round-up of some of the comments on newspaper articles about the poster. Highlights include (insert your own "sic"s as necessary): "What next, a child posing unrolling a condom?" "What is next children pretending to have sex to show them how adults have sex." "It is the sort of picture that a paedophile would show a kid to say look it is ok to do that because it is what grown ups/mothers do. What next."
Seriously, what next, you guys? Two-year-olds just walking around in public pretending their dollies are their own babies? Why can't we let children be children, for heaven's sake?!? Oh. wait.
As the Hoyden post vividly demonstrates, a two-minute Google image search will bring up pictures galore of little girls play-feeding baby dolls, which we're meant to see as wholesome and charming -- because the girls are using bottles. But little girls (and boys) who hold toys to their chests, mimicking the kind of baby-feeding they know best? Distasteful! Inappropriate! Disgusting! Unlike, say, insisting that kids' innocent play is sexual. Or insisting that mothers in the act of feeding hungry babies should be thinking of the strangers they might arouse instead of meeting their children's needs. Those things are totally cool. Keep up the good work! Just don't ever let a girl grow up thinking breasts are for anything but other people's sexual pleasure. We don't want to confuse the poor things.
― Kate Harding
the article isn't well written but you get the point of my outrage.
the piece of my soul was about gideon but i can't do it. mark you commented before about my ability to just let it all come forward on the page - it seems to be gone. i just can't. now if only my mind would stop too.
my mother took the boy to see 'earth' today. i guess he was enrapt all except for the last 15 minutes or so. and i went back to yoga. i do feel a little better already. course i bet going to bed at 8.30 last night and the nap today didn't hurt either, huh?
2 comments:
Naps are possibly the most underrated thing in the whole world.
I would think it was adorable if Sadie mimicked me breast feeding.
If you follow one of the links from the article, you'll hit the jackpot: the grandmother who found it "shocking" and "disgusting" is 39 years old.
Let me re-state for the dramatic effect.
Someone who is clearly from a family where teenagers aren't just having sex, they're having kids, thinks that the idea of young girls breast feeding their dolls is offensive. Talk about hypocrisy.
As well as stupidity.
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