So, I'm reading for my classes and researching for my speeches, and I had to take a quick break and share something that I read.
While researching for my persuasive speech on breastfeeding in The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts Are Bad for Business by Gabrielle Palmer, I came across this passage:
"Though any part of a woman's body can be a focus of eroticism, our era is the first in recorded history where the breast has become a public fetish for male sexual stimulation, while its primary function has diminished on a vast scale. Perhaps the only parallel is the phenomenon of foot-binding in China, when the primary use of a part of the body was sacrificed to serve the cult of sexual fetishism which celebrated female helplessness."
To counter-act this horrible exploitation of the female breast by men and the correlated decline in breastfeeding that is so detrimental to our society, I plan to start a non-profit, activist groups called "Breasts Are for Babies!" We will have the action statement: "Take back your breasts! Go slap a man!"
I hope you had a good chuckle. I did.
(updated later)Although I tend to make light of any subject, I'd like to end on a serious note. Breastfeeding is happily again on the rise after a steady decline in this country. Cited in the her book, Gabrielle Palmer tells of one study which estimates that "...helping and supporting women breastfeeding would save more children's lives than any other public health preventive intervention, more even than immunization, or improved water sanitation."
The research I've been doing is even more compelling, though, and I plan on posting my paper when it is completed, hopefully before Thanksgiving. The evidence is compelling to me, but I'll let you decide for yourselves.
(Note: I am not here to attack anyone's feeding method of choice for their baby. Instead, I am relaying some information I have found on a topic that is completely fascinating to me)
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