Backwards thinking.....it's hard to combat it because it's so illogical that oftentimes you are left speechless.It all started with this doll. Then the debate ensued, that I got caught up in on a local radio show. Little girls modeling healthy behavior quickly turned into a discussion on eroticising our little girls. Breastfeeding=perversion? What?! The radio host wouldn't stop defending her point, and in the process revealed her bias that she didn't like the sight of breastfeeding from anyone. That's what you get when you live in a culture with such abysmal breastfeeding rates, I suppose. What people don't understand is that if our children learn from an early age the appropriate use of breasts, they will use them more appropriately as teens and adults and we will have less sexual dysfunction in our society. Add on to that, three separate studies that report that people (men and women) view breastfeeding women as, in a word, dumb.
Smith and her colleagues suggest that health professionals should “teach pregnant women about the sexism they might encounter” when they choose to breastfeed. In terms of society as a whole, they argue the only way this bias will diminish is for more women to breastfeed openly.You 'hear' that? If women want to be treated with more respect and autonomy, they better start breastfeeding in public en masse.
“More visible breastfeeding mothers should prompt people to wrestle with and debate the issues,” they write. “With time, greater numbers of women who breastfeed translates to less prejudice.”
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