So, you’ve got your brand new baby, now you’ve got to feed it.
For many years now medical and child-experts (what ever they are?) have told us “Breast is Best”.
- Baby’s Best Food – Every Mother Should Nurse Her Baby!
A beautiful 1930′s design, very traditional, but completely lacking in sexy.
A recent article in a British babycare magazine has challenged this pro-breastfeeding stance, on the grounds of sexiness. Reported in Sunday’s Observer newspaper, the deputy editor of “Mother & Baby” magazine, Kathryn Blundell, discusses her decision not to breastfeed because it is “creepy”.
Ms. Blundell is honest in her desire to retain her body the way she likes it, to be able to drink when she wants, to see herself as an attractive, sexy woman. She does not want this aspect of herself and her life to stop because she is a mother.
Who can blame her? But who said it had to?
Breastfeeding can be a contentious topic. There can certainly be a great deal of pressure on a new mum to chose breast when her baby is born. Let’s face it, breast milk is made, by nature, for the express purpose of nourishing our off-spring. We are mammals, that’s what we do, just like all other mammals. Equally, Ms. Blundell’s positive affirmation of her choice to bottle feed gives those who choose this option an influential champion.
Just recently Lesley Backhouse, chair of the Breastfeeding Network, wrote to the Department of Health to ask them to scrap the old, “Breast is Best”, slogan so that breastfeeding could be normalised in society.
The Guardian newspaper has published a series of sexier promotional images, used by the NHS, to show that a woman need not be relegated to unattractive because of her baby feeding choice.
By Sophie Barker and Kayleigh Brooks for Get Britain Breast Feeding (Best Beginnings Central Saint Martins Poster Competition)
It can be difficult for some, as Blundell states in her article, to balance the notion of breasts as a food source and breasts as a pleasure source. The old dichotomy of woman as either mother or sexual object seems alive and just as kicking in the early 21st Century as ever.
How have we not moved past this point?
Women, like men of course, are varied and multi-faceted. Daughters, sisters, independent, carers, wives, partners, single, mothers, childfree, childless, fulfilled, anxious.
My concern is not whether Kathryn Blundell, or anyone else, chooses to breast or bottle feed. My concern is why we still do not seem to have the capacity to see our motherhood as moving in tandem with our sexuality. Why we still impose, on ourselves, one or the other. This is not the reality for most women. Is it?
Sure those early days of motherhood are not usually times when we feel our most sexy. Certainly we rarely feel that much like having sex. Our breasts can be maps of pain when we have mastitis or systemic thrush. Ahh, the feeling of those come right back even after nine years.
But any woman who has breastfed knows those feelings pass, at different rates of different women, but they do pass. Using our bodies for all they were created is possible. Of course no one has to, but a woman fully in touch with all aspects of her femininity is a sexy woman.
No, none of this means if you decided to bottle-feed you are less of a mother or less of a woman or less sexy, absolutely not. Just don’t think that the nursing mother has given up on her sexuality either.
Women, we are varied and that’s what makes us wonderful.
© 2010, Penbleth. All rights reserved.
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