Saturday, May 01, 2010

New look, new title

As an unanticipated consequence of my subject about using technology in the language classroom I decided I should try to use my blog more often, more often that is than once every ten months which is how long it's been. I do have a good excuse, but I thought it was time to delve back into the pleasurable vanity of blogging as a handy procrastination tool. I am studying again, I have had a baby. Both these things mean I have no spare time (mostly the second one) and therefore it follows that I need something to do in all the spare time I don't have.
Clear as mud.

The reason for the new title is that I feel having a daughter has sharpened those feminist instincts I had as a feisty teenager and were dulled by early adulthood and other distractions. We live in a sexist world, sometimes so much so it hurts to look too closely at it in case you throw your hands up in despair and go and live in a cave. But a blog is a good way for me to point out all the things I don't like about the world without boring my loved ones to tears, and without sending myself to the asylum by keeping it all bottled up. Which is bad for you.

The first thing I would like to rant in a very unstructured way about is: breastfeeding. Not the act itself, which is pretty damn fantastic, but its sheer invisibility in the world. You never read about it, you never hear about it, you never see it in movies and rarely in life. I can't express milk in public because it's weird. Why is it that I can blow my nose, but not express milk for my baby? This Facebook site was a result of women reacting to the decision by Facebook to randomly delete pictures of them breastfeeding because they were deemed obscene. So, not only is it invisible, when it is out there it's seen as flashing your breasts. The fact that there is a baby involved is somehow so irrelevant to the primary issue which is of course, women as sexual objects. Get over it, world.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Welcome back - it's nice to see you online!

There was a woman breastfeeding at the 40th I was at yesterday, and another at yum cha today ... made me happy.

I hear ya.

xx

JA said...

yeah welcome back!

at least my friends father feels breastfeedig is no "intimate act" and there´s no need to hide - that is what he claimed when he popped into the room (twice)where I was breastfeeding my 8 week old baby, and I asked him if he could probably wait upstairs with everyone else....

uhm..
he´s probably right...

Alexis, Baron von Harlot said...

Have you had a chance to read Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap? It has a character who's breastfeeding her four(?)-year-old, which elicits everything from discomfort to disgust from the other characters. You can't tell what Tsiolkas's own position is through the fog of different narrative voices, but it's a very powerful representation of our society's confusion - about the fact that we're mammals.

It'd probably help if breasts weren't sexual fetish objects - which they're not in lots of cultures.

TimT said...

The scene that comes to my mind is one in the Midwich Cuckoos - ever read it? About mind-controlling alien children who have somehow been implanted in the wombs of human mothers. There's a scene where one of these evil mind-controlling freak babies makes it's mother breastfeed - in public. Shock horror, etc.

Unknown said...

Thanks for your blog. By the way anyone who thinks that breastfeeding in public or anywhere is obscene needs their head examined. It's not about the breast or the feeding but about their opinion of it. Those of us who are lucky have all been breast fed. That's why we have breasts but for those with their little dirty minds they have it all wrong. How can you loathe the thing that sustained you, us.
Anyway, I am wondering if you could do me the favour of listening to any of the tracks in the link that follows and enjoy and if you feel like it a feedback would be appreciated. Thank you very much and keep up the good work. Girls need to learn about stuff like this. The act of deleting breast feeding pictures could be a possible human rights violation is some countries.
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