fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2718 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2718 ⌋

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[Mayim Bialik]

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[Pacific Rim]

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Might be another 12 am day. Response time will be slow, sorry.

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well, some parts of it seem limited to babies, like breastfeeding (except in those creepy stories you find on the internet). but idk about others. i've heard about co-sleeping lasting until the kid's like 7 or 8. also "long-term" breastfeeding is very vague. how long is long-term? six months? one year old? two years old? there's definitely a point where most people go "creepy!".

Not to open a can of worms, but what makes long-term breastfeeding "creepy" is cultural, not biological. Most mammals breast feed their babies until they are roughly 3 in human years. We're primates who have been told that our baby-feeding organs are actually mostly sexual, and therefore having them around a child is problematic. But that's what they're there for! I wish I saw more breastfeeding toddlers at the very least, honestly. It's good for the immune system and for bonding with Mom.

i know it's a cultural thing, but there's not much i can do to overcome my initial reaction. in my culture no one breastfeeds in public and very few women breastfeed at all (and if they do, only for a couple of months). that's just the way our society has developed. and it has shaped my subconscious in such a way that when i see someone breastfeeding i automatically look away, and if the child is older than 1 year old my brain screams "creepy".
anyway, i wasn't breastfed and i don't think i suffered for it. i'm sure it has beneficial effects, but it isn't mandatory or anything.

breastfeeding certainly isn't mandatory, and it's not possible for everyone, but it IS good for you. If your culture is such that you have an aversion to women breastfeeding for more than a few months or breastfeeding in public*, maybe that's an aspect of your culture that deserves critique.

*I have no idea if this is an issue in France, but in the US there's a lot of controversy over the right of a woman to breastfeed in public. A lot of people are really freaked out at the idea of a woman showing her breast in public because, like anon said, culture has taught us that breasts are sexual organs when in fact they're not, just secondary sex characteristics men usually find attractive. But a long, long history of men deciding how things are gonna be has warped our perception of breasts pretty severely. And there are many US women who want to be able to publicly feed their babies without being ogled or told off, and I think they absolutely deserve to do so.

culture has taught us that breasts are sexual organs when in fact they're not, just secondary sex characteristics men usually find attractive.

This may be absolutely true for some women, but for some of us it definitely isn't. My breasts aren't just an erogenous zone, they're my primary means of becoming aroused. I can't quite reach orgasm from nipple stimulation alone, but I can get damn close. I most definitely consider them to be sexual organs, or rather, organs with a very significant sexual function.

To complicate matters, however, when I was breast-feeding my daughter, the sensation was completely different and not the least bit sexually arousing. So it's fair to say (at least for me, and I have to assume I'm not unique out of roughly 3.5 billion women alive today,) that breasts are not sex organs during breastfeeding, but it's disingenuous to claim that they're only ever viewed as sex organs because boob-obsessed men say so, or that the two functions can't legitimately get mixed up in peoples' minds.

Er, well, erogenous zone =/= sex organ. Some people get really turned on by having their back, feet, or hair touched. Some people can get off just by thinking about it. You wouldn't call a brain a sex organ unless you were being really pedantic about neurological...ok that's a bad example because our brains aren't visible anyway. But anyway, you wouldn't tell people to cover up some other non-genital part of their body because it's stimulating to you or to them.

I get that there are reasons people think this. I get that it gets mixed up in peoples' minds. I still think we need to work to change that. Breasts aren't sex organs. Women don't deserve to be shamed into breastfeeding in dirty bathrooms or keeping their baby hungry just because people are offended by normal body parts.

But isn't the point of breastfeeding to feed your child until it can reasonably feed itself? EDIT: It must also be noted that I do not have children and know very little about actually raising them, at least on a physical level.

Edited 2014-06-13 00:14 (UTC)

Yes, but only because a long time ago humans lived hand-to-mouth. It's a lot more inefficient and exhausting to breastfeed a kid than just make it eat food, plus people often had kids much more frequently. Breast milk is really healthy for a growing toddler. A lot more nutritious and better suited to humans than cow's milk.

To be fair, humans are unique among mammals in a VARIETY of ways, including endurance, healing ability, maturation rate, and internet usage. Breastfeeding might or might not be on that list too, so it's a bit of a specious argument. I'm not saying it's wrong necessarily, just specious.

Just because we're different in some ways doesn't mean we're different in all, and breastfeeding is a demonstrably healthy practice.

yeah...hmm. guess it depends on what one means when one says "attachment parenting" then. it's one thing to do that stuff with babies, another for an 8-year-old kid.

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