The Alpha Parent is at it again. In her never ending quest to boost her own fragile self esteem, she commented on the HuffPo piece Food For Thought: How I Feed My Baby Is None of Your Business.
The author, Darlene Cunha, is spot on in her observations:
One of the most startling discoveries I made upon becoming a mom is that parenting is a competitive sport in which there are no winners. Something as simple and necessary as feeding your child is cause for judgement and snobbery from parents who do it differently…
There are many reasons that people might formula feed; necessary medication that doesn’t mix with breastfeeding being one of the biggest. To me, though, it doesn’t matter if one woman is feeding her infant formula because she couldn’t produce enough breast milk, and another is doing it because she’s on medication that could be harmful to the baby, and a third is doing it because she doesn’t like the feel of the baby at her breast. It’s simply not my business.
Allison Dixley, “The Alpha Parent,” the self proclaimed avatar of “the snobby side of parenting” commented because she recognized that she was the prime target of the piece. Her comment, now removed, directed readers to her notorious post Why the way you feed your baby is my business:
“My baby, my choice”.
“It’s got nothing to do with you how I feed my baby”.
“Live and let live”.These are classic lines you’ll hear from some defensive formula feeding mothers whenever a breastfeeding advocate points out the flaws of formula. The message from those who give formula to their babies is clear: “It’s none of your business”. Yet I argue that the way a mother chooses to feed her baby IS my business…
Dixley attempts to justify her obnoxiousness with the usual concatenation of stupid reasons (“breastfeeding prevents autism,” “breastfeeding prevents appendicitis”) and actually tries t0 justify biological essentialism (reducing women to breasts, vagina and uterus) as liberation. In addition, Dixley creates a few moronic “reasons” of her own: formula is apparently responsible for the “distorted” view that breasts are sexual objects (Earth to Dixley: a body part can have more than one function), the decrease in the IQ of the population (average IQ increased as breastfeeding decreased), and the claim that formula feeding causes child abuse and crime (clearly she hasn’t heard that correlation is not causation).
Like most quacks, she suffers from projectile verbosity. It seems that the more idiotic your claims are, the more words you must vomit upon the rest of us to explain them.
Dixley is a classic sanctimommy. Sanctimommies suffer from overwhelmingly ostentatious “sadness”. They are so “sad” for you that you don’t do everything their way. They are so “sad” for your children that you are not parenting the way they prescribe. They are just so “sad” that your children are going to end up abused, autistic, criminals with low IQs, all because you didn’t breastfeed like Dixley does.
I’d like to offer a few words of advice to Allison:
The way other women feed their babies is NOT your business. This may come as a tremendous shock, but the rest of us exist for reasons other than to boost your pitifully fragile self-esteem by mirroring your own choices back to you.
I don’t care that you breastfeed your child(ren); it’s not my business, but your sanctimony certainly is my business. I’m a healthcare provider and as such, I feel responsible for both the physical AND mental health of others. Your goal is to make other women feel bad. I recognize that is because you feel bad about yourself, and like most people with poor self-esteem, tearing others down makes you feel better.
It is important for the women you target (emotionally vulnerable new mothers) to understand that you are nothing more than a classic “Mean Girl.” According to Urban Dictionary, mean girls are:
…[g]irls who are bullies and use “girl agression” (nasty comments, trickery, deceit, … etc.) to manipulate other girls.
Everything about you from your moniker (as subtle as a sledgehammer), to your fabricated claims, to your nauseating sanctimony is about one thing, and one thing only: beating down other women so you feel better about yourself in comparison.
How women feed their babies is nobody’s business but their own. How some women use sanctimony to belittle vulnerable women is everybody’s business, and since it is my business, I feel free to say:
Get a life, get into therapy, and stop trying to feel better about yourself by making other women feel bad about themselves.
