Fucking Feministing!

[logansrogue]

Their comment engine is down. I'm fucking pissed. I wanted to leave a comment on the Spanish Breastfeeding Baby-Doll. I spent some time on it, so I'm putting it up here:



Yeah, feminists can piss me off. We're not all going to agree with each other all the time. Here is me disagreeing with some:

Why do we have to politicise everything that little children do? Or sexualise them? I have such wonderful memories of having a baby doll of my own, and I loved that doll cause my Mum gave it to me for Christmas. My little sister had a baby doll too. Mine had wool hair, (rubber cabbage-patch doll) and my sister's was a realistic baby with a cloth body. We both tended those dolls lovingly, and my Mum had just had our little brother Scotty. My sister and I would play with the babies and pretend to breastfeed, just like Mum was breastfeeding her little baby. And we both grew up to be dyed-in-the-wool feminists, just as our mother is a feminist.

We were drenched in the wonder of childbirth and life when we were little because my mother and our much older big sisters were going through that stage of their lives. Damning that or taking that away from a little girl is taking away a choice and that's so wrong. Even if they never want children themselves, or want to grow up to be a person that is not femme in the slightest, there is never anything wrong with growing up with an appreciation of how life begins, and how wonderful motherhood can be.

I know I would have loved this toy as a child. I see more to be worried about in the way adults are freaking out about this doll, on either side of the divide (the FauxNews dudes and the women here who are rallying against this 'indoctrination' of motherhood).

The last thing we need to do is cut motherhood out of our lives. The first thing we need to do is to learn now normal and wonderful motherhood is and to teach this to our children - of either sex. If a child learns the value of life, and the hard work and commitment involved in that, then hopefully they won't be so ready to disregard other lives, either in violence or in policy when they grow up.