The dirty little secret about lactivism is that it has nothing to do with babies or even with breastfeeding. It’s all about lactivists and their desperate need to feel better than other mothers.
Lactivism is about hating and hurting. How else to explain the breathtaking viciousness of contemporary lactivists?
When it comes to viciousness, the Alpha Parent has no equal. Her recent endorsement of a guest post by James Akre on analogizing breastfeeding is a tour de force of the genre.
I like using the ordinary to approach what is commonplace for some but still unfamiliar for others. The purpose is twofold: to show how everyday analogies, images, metaphors, similes and symbols can be used to see breast milk and breastfeeding from a fresh perspective; and to suggest how this approach in turn can help others see breast milk and breastfeeding in ways they would surely never have imagined…
English to English translation: I’d like to beat you about the head with all the ways that I am better than you.
You must, must, must read the entire post. There is so much delicious venom that it would be a shame to miss a drop. However, in the interests of brevity, I will summarize:
Analogy # 1 Of pleasure and pain
You are so selfish that you willingly take on the pain of wearing high heels, but you can’t be bothered to endure the pain of breastfeeding?
Analogy #2 Flying civilly
Formula is like those oxygen masks that drop from the ceiling when an airplane cabin depressurizes in flight; useful in emergencies but inappropriate at any other time.
Analogy #3 Break glass only in case of emergency
The accompanying image says it all:
Analogy #4 The sky’s the limit
If we were to decline to provide our children with the nutritional equivalent of a plush suite in a five-star hotel by feeding them artificially, we would do well not to kid ourselves into believing that, by giving formula, we’re somehow at least replacing the suite with adequate three- or four-star accommodation. In fact, our children still end up eating in the basement.
My breastfed baby gets The Ritz. Your bottlefed baby gets the pits.
Analogy #5 Holding hands with history
When a mother who, herself, has been breastfed breastfeeds her child, she at once completes and forges historical links of great consequence.
Historical significance? Really?
Analogy #6 Row, row your fashion boat
We can easily afford to provide our children with the finest in tailor-made nourishment, and this for a fraction of the price of even vulgar mass-produced synthetic nutritional frippery.
Analogy #7 Just do your best, Dear
It’s true, some parents deliberately opt to provide their children with nutritional mediocrity; but rich or poor, top-of-the-line elite nutrition is accessible to all.
Analogy #8 Kinky accoutrements
A bottle of formula is just a kinky accountrement. What does that even mean?
Analogy #9 Before you buy shoes, measure your feet
In a critical piece of ground-based navigation software one development team had used Imperial units, i.e. inches, feet and pounds, while another had used metric units. Since the software hadn’t been told to do any conversions, it appeared that the Orbiter got its trajectory wrong and crashed into the Martian surface. Meanwhile, the Mars Polar Lander reached its target at the beginning of December 1999. After 11 months of traveling some 35 million miles (more than 56 million kilometers) in space, the $165 million craft was a mere 130 feet (40 meters) from landing when disaster struck, or rather both the Lander and its piggybacking Deep Space-2 probes were likewise destroyed when they struck the surface…
Formula, rat poison, it’s all the same. If you feed your baby formula, he or she will be destroyed in a spectacular flame out.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. This sewage spewed forth by Akre and Dixley has nothing to do with what’s good for babies. It has nothing to do with babies at all. It’s self-serving viciousness for those who love to hate.
Here’s my analogy:
These people are vipers in the grass: all natural, and deadly. Their goal is to bite you and eat you alive, for the fragile self-esteem of lactivists is not supported by breastmilk; it is nourished by venom.
