[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]If breastmilk is only milk than they are only mothers — and that’s simply unacceptable.[/pullquote]
There’s a saying that fish can’t see water because they entirely surrounded by it. Similarly lactivists can’t see brainwashing because they’re entirely surrounded by it.
Consider these gems:
This came from a mommy group.
If you don’t breastfeed you’re a selfish cunt.
Sherry posted this on my Facebook page.
If I had a tailored 5 star meal defy (sic) every single day vs just a mcdonalds burger every meal … im picking the 5 star meal… Shit food = shit health. Sooner or later the effects will show.
What made Sherry so upset? These quotes come from Pam Lowe’s book Reproductive Health and Maternal Sacrifice.
The underlying assumption … is that women who decline breastfeeding only do so through ignorance or as the dupes of formula marketing campaigns…
That women might have different needs and priorities and could make an informed choice not to breastfeed is not considered seriously.
Sherry certainly hasn’t considered it seriously.
What’s going on here? Why are lactivists reduced to using profanity to describe women who can’t or don’t wish to feed their babies using their body parts?
I believe that they are brainwashed. They are so brainwashed — choosing to marinate in the toxic lactivist stew of minimal scientific knowledge and a desperately desired sense of superiority — that they can’t even begin to see that they’ve been brainwashed.
Here’s where I make the obligatory bow to the benefits of breastfeeding. Yes, breastfeeding has benefits, but in industrialized countries with access to clean water, those benefits for term babies are trivial, a few less colds and episodes of diarrheal illness across the entire population of infants in the first year; there is potentially a reduced risk of SIDS (although that research is plagued by confounding variables), and, in any case, can be duplicated by simply giving a baby a pacifier.
Why have lactivists come to believe that women who can’t or don’t breastfeed are “selfish cunts” feeding their babies “shit food”?
Two reasons: economic and psychological.
The economic reason is pretty obvious to someone as old as I am, who went through medical training before the rise of lactation consultants. Breastfeeding has been around since the beginning of human existence but no one was especially impressed by its advantages until a group of women appeared whose entire income is predicated on convincing women that breastfeeding has extraordinary advantages.
In an effort to keep the customers coming, lactation consultants and the organizations that represent them, have resorted to modern advertising techniques. Unlike toothpaste manufacturers they don’t imply that if you use their toothpaste everyone will like you better. Instead, they imply that if you breastfeed, you will like yourself better because you will be better than other mothers.
The lactation consultants’ search for business has dovetailed nicely with a larger cultural trend — problematizing infant safety in order to convince women that only their bodies stand between their children and disaster. How better to convince women to retreat back into the home than by telling them their precious babies will die (or even worse, fail to get into Harvard) if they don’t?
It’s a form of brainwashing. The law prevents those who fear women’s emancipation from discriminating against them to force them back into the home. In response, they’ve resorted to distortions, exaggerations and lies to convince women to force themselves back into the home.
The new “momism” attempt to convince women that their children face hideous dangers as a result of everything from formula to forced abduction. Therefore women must use their constant physical presence and their very bodies to protect their babies.
Women like the creator of the charming cunt meme and those who denounce infant formula as shit food have completely fallen for the brainwashing. Indeed, they have staked their self-image on the belief that their sacrifices of time, energy and personal boundaries mark them as superior to other mothers.
How devastating for them then when other women fail to acknowledge that superiority. If infant formula is just as good as breastmilk for term babies (and all the real world population data at our disposal indicates that it is) then they aren’t superior at all. They’re dupes who have made immense sacrifices for nothing much.
They’ve been brainwashed but they not only can’t see it; they can’t allow themselves to see it.
That’s why they insist that women who can’t or don’t breastfeed are victims of false information or false consciousness. That’s why they call them cunts and purveyors of shit food. If breastmilk is only milk than they are only mothers — and that’s simply unacceptable.
