This is a scream!!

December 02, 2003

All Hot and Bothered about Breastfeeding

I literally laughed so hard reading this I gave myself a stomach ache!! Please, go to the blog and read this posting… it’s a real hoot!!

I don’t want to milk this subject for more than it’s worth, but I couldn’t help noticing a recent skirmish in St. Blogs over what Micki refers to as “public nursing,” conjuring in the process an image of the general public queueing up for a chance at the prize. Says she, “For those women who have a problem with public nursing because they may accidentally see a bit of nip, I say grow up.” (Accidentally, Micki?) I find it interesting that it’s “women” who have a problem with it, but right now I’m most interested in nipping this problem in the bud, before its dimensions swell out of all proportion. I mean, in this corner we have Micki, Sparki, Alicia, Pansy and Peony and a whole bevy of like-minded supporters – including, ominously, a lawyer, Dale Price, – all standing in defense of the practice, pleading the case for ‘natural, nourishing, not sexy, and none of your business even if it is’; and in this corner…Michelle, hanging out pretty much all by herself (that doesn’t mean what it sounds like), casting the cool eye of logic on behalf of modesty, privacy, and you’re making it my business.

This is beginning to look like a real hardball game of tit for spat and it has got to stop. For those who would like me to take sides, that’s not what I’m here for. (Actually, no one even asked my opinion, and that’s always when I’m most willing to give it.) I’m here to calm things down, to serve as a sort of collective pacifier (don’t take that the wrong way) before the fault lines of this dispute fracture into outright schism. I’m worried, you see, about the so-called nipple,sorry, ripple-effect should this imbroglio spread to all corners of St. Blogs. What if some atheist drops in looking to be converted and all he sees are words like ‘breast,’ ‘nipple,’ ‘sucking,’ and, Peony’s favorite, ‘whip it out?’ (I’d always thought that’s what men did. Women…I dont know what they do but it’s something else.) Our atheist is going to wonder whatever happened to the filioque controversy, isn’t he? He’s going to wonder why spiritual people are so concerned with how to behave in the presence of certain body parts, isn’t he? He’s going to think we’re the sexually repressed neurotics we’ve always been accused of being, for whom sex can never really be any fun unless we’re sweating the small stuff into inifinity, isn’t he? He’s going to think he might as well become an Episcopalian.