Good for Ms Hayek. 

I never “weaned” any of my kids; they breast-fed until they didn’t want to any more.  One of them was still coming back for the occasional taste at four years old. 

Of course, I lived in a different world then.  The only time I noticed people being uncomfortable about it was when I ventured into “regular” society.  Had to see my mother now and then.  (She breast-fed us by the way, for all of about eight months.)

Selma Hayek can breastfeed me anytime!

Moderator’s note: I’m only leaving this up as a stellar example of how men who suffer from inability to read or other strong inadequacies take it out on women for being women.

If she rejects the misogynist assessment of women and reacts with anger, then she is accused of having no sense of humor or not being able to take a compliment.

And the immediate “Why are you so angry? God what a bitch!” and playing ignorant that so many men do.

Breast feeding is something that we continually try and socially discipline.  Time after time when women have attempted to feed our children in public we have been ordered into change rooms, bathrooms are asked to leave the premises. Many have no problem expressing discomfort at the site of a woman feeding their child because breasts have become the sexualized play things of men.  The fact that breasts might have another purpose completely removed from male sexual pleasure is abhorrent to patriarchy because women are deemed property.

This of course competes with the idealized mother social construction.  Once becoming a mother the pressure to breast feed by the medical establishment is enormous.  If for some reason you cannot or won’t you are immediately judged a bad mother. The idea of judgment helps keep the exploitative wet nurse industry in business. You can still provide the best for your child, just pay some poor disenfranchised WOC to act as a milk cow,

I find the whole breastfeed because otherwise your a shitty mother and don’t breastfeed because breasts are for sex to be competing messages.  No where in either side of the debate are women humanized enough so that what we want or say about our bodies matter.

Big deal. I knew two women who breastfed to four.

Aside from the reproduction, hormonal stuff, providing a place to kick, and teabagging, testicles just aren’t all that useful.  But if I ever get tired of them, they’ll always have a place on my rear bumper.

*snort*

“Recommendations for optimal breastfeeding
The World Health Organization and UNICEF recommendations on breastfeeding are as follows: initiation of breastfeeding within the first hour after the birth; exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months; and continued breastfeeding for two years or more, together with safe, nutritionally adequate, age appropriate, responsive complementary feeding starting in the sixth month.”

I’ve heard large breasts be called ‘milk jugs’. I think men are a lot more ambivalent about big boobs than you’d think. I developed early and big, so I’ve seen a lot of the ‘attraction with disgust’ thing.

As someone whose first thought, upon seeing those pictures, was “va va VOOM!” I don’t think *all* the people who post comments like those are trying to put Salma down.  Some, sure, but not all.

Amanda:  After reading your post, I was put in mind of Jack Lemon (in drag) talking about men with Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot..  “Beasts!  Big, hairy beasts”!

Sorry, I’m reminded of the Little Britain sketch with the adult child of an upper class couple wanting “bitty”...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8orUaCJ0GY

I find the whole breastfeed because otherwise your a shitty mother and don’t breastfeed because breasts are for sex to be competing messages.  No where in either side of the debate are women humanized enough so that what we want or say about our bodies matter.

I can’t remember where I saw this statistic, but apparently the #1 factor in how long a woman breastfeeds is her husband/boyfriend’s attitude towards it.  Women whose male partners are supportive breastfeed for longer than those whose aren’t.

Good on her.  It’s good for the baby and if she’s comfortable breastfeeding, then it’s really not our business. 

I know a woman who breastfed her oldest until around four and is still feeding her youngest--who will be three in the spring.  And really, it’s her decision and as long as she and the kids are okay with it, who the hell cares.

And is a woman decides she doesn’t want to breastfeed or that she wants to stop early, then that’s also not my business.  There are other ways to feed a baby.  Personally, I hated breastfeeding.  Hated every single second of it.  I did it for a year with both my kids, until they were old enough for cow’s milk (because breastmilk is free and formula is expensive--and I’m cheap), but I counted down the days until I could be done with it.

And also, everything Renee said upthread.

Other that “women are public property, and most especially attractive, successful women”, what can this possibly be about?

It’s nice living somewhere that breastfeeding is just not an issue. (OK, it’s a little bit of an issue if you don’t.)

I’m sorry, Amanda, what were you saying?

Whatever, JL.  Nice try.  A woman, speaking as a complete adult, objects to demeaning women by treating them like public property/sex objects/animals, and you resort to the fourth way to demean women---calling us children---to dismiss me.  You proved my point more than you shut me down.

Yeah, I know, idio.  Thank god for breasts---they give you an excuse to dismiss women’s whole persons and you get to blame the women for having the audacity to have them!  Just ask Ann Althouse about that. 

Mnem, that doesn’t surprise me one bit.  I mean, a person in public saying something is a minor annoyance, but your partner saying something over and over and over becomes a genuine quality of life issue.  It’s easier to give up the boob than put up with it, I’m sure.

Seriously… not only is it her business, not ours, but *what phoenician said re: the world health organization & unicef.*

Good for her for standing up for the right to do what’s best for her baby!

I’m honestly amazed that at least 3 comments in this thread are examples of what I’m talking about.  Breasts really are a stronghold way to remind women that they’re less than.  Especially if they’re large.  On what Lynst said---most men feel ambivalent about large breasts, in that they think they’re sexy but also that they’re just too much of a reminder of our mammalian status---I think the invention of the fake breast is our culture’s way of resolving that tension.  Here are breasts that have the good parts (big), but because they’re fake, they can be wholly claimed by men as sex toys, and don’t have the animal baggage.

My reasoning brain just shut down for on the order of 30 seconds with those photos.  It was complete monkey time in my male skull.  Not only that, but once I had come out of my stupor, there was a visceral reluctance on my part to read the article.  So mission accomplished!

I’ve seen a woman breast-feeding an older child only once, and it was in the sort of place (a cafe in Somerville, MA) where you’d expect such a thing to be allowed. It was a deeply disconcerting event, but I think mainly because it’s just not something you see very much in our culture.

I’m a guy. I certainly like looking at breasts; that’s a caveman thing I’m kinda stuck with. But I’d like to think I know better than to judge someone based on just feeding their child.

I’m not sure how to articulate this as precisely as I’d like to, but isn’t there a difference between something like “objectification” and “putting women in their place”?  Are all the comments working together such that the lascivious ones are _also_ attempting to demean or shame Salma Hayek?  The ones about how the baby is too old for this _are_ doing that, but are all of them? 

There’s something more than a little creepy about wishing to be a breastfeeding infant because it would enable an adult sexual fantasy, and there’s no reason why anyone’s breasts ought to be the subject of a stranger’s comments, be they approving or disapproving.  But I’m not sure I see the shaming.  Or is the idea that the sex-fantasy part arises from the idea that if Salma Hayek likes breastfeeding even when the baby is (supposedly) too old, then maybe it’s become something kinky for her?  Ugh, it creeps me out just to write that.  I’m sorry.

Yeah, I know about the “men can’t help it” excuse, idio.  If your brain had shut down, then how could you type?  Typing is not a passive event, but an active attempt to communicate to both men and women something about women and their bodies and their status relative to yours.

Yeah, I know, idio.  Thank god for breasts---they give you an excuse to dismiss women’s whole persons and you get to blame the women for having the audacity to have them!  Just ask Ann Althouse about that.

I realize that if you even barely know who I am that’s certainly going to be your default answer.  I personally don’t have these issues.

I trust that my criticism of your visual attack was received, though?

Couple of points I would like to make as an anthropologist.  First, breastfeeding for more than a year is far from unusual.  In nonindustrial societies two years is common, as mother’s milk is one of the best sources of nutrition, and among mobile foragers (people who live entirely off wild foods) four years is comon if not the norm.  This reaction to breastfeeding reflects the efforts of makers of artificial formula.

Second, scientists, as opposed to sexist pricks, “obsess” about the function of human breasts for the same reason as they obsess about the appendix.  The permanently enlarged breasts of human women, like the appendix, serve no discernible biologic function (unlike testicles) while imposing significant costs on the organism.  Generally, evolution eliminates or reduces organic structures which serve no vital function in order to conserve resources.  Permanently enlarged breasts are not necessary for lactation and seem not to be linked to that (our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos do not have them).  Various explanations have been put forth, but none seems entirely satisfactory or compelling, though some sort of sexual selection seems the strongest contender.  Even that would be odd as it would represent to only example of male sexual selection of which I am aware (in other species it is the females who do the selecting).  That said, you are perfectly correct about the popular obsession with breasts.

Nope, Flip.  “Objectification” is making someone an object for your use.  Now, finding someone attractive is one thing.  To say, “Salma Hayek is a lovely woman,” is true.  To say that her body compels you to make cracks about how you can’t listen to women speak, or to make fun of her by saying that you want to suck her tits is not the same thing.  Now, I understand that these insults are disguised as compliments.  Of course they are.  It makes it hard for women to fight back that way.

Or, to be shorter about it, leering and shaming are both bad, and both are demonstrations of the power of the “male gaze,” but IMHO they’re differently bad, not two sides of the same coin.

Timeline:

00:00 Gape, drool commences.
00:30 Snap out of it.
00:31 Feel foolish.
00:45 Scroll down, feel reasoning return.
00:50 Start reading everything below the front-page fold, including comments
04:50 Engage in flame war with posting blogger.

Ain’t rocket science.

I saw that post, and I thought the title that Lauredhel used summed it up beautifully: “Salma Hayek “still” breastfeeding - world can’t decide whether to jerk off or prosecute”

Yeah, DrDick.  That stuff is interesting.  Scientists trying to figure out why humans have large breasts, or such variety, is a lot different than what I’m talking about.  Obviously, the dickish comments about women’s breasts are hurtful and intended to be hurtful.  It’s not a great mystery why someone as beautiful as Hayek attracts this abuse.  I mean, the guys making these jokes aren’t ever going to have sex with her, and they resent that, and so of course they’re going to reach straight for their male privilege to lord her female body functions over her.  It’s not markedly different than guys who dismiss women’s anger by referring to women’s menstruation (PMS jokes).  I can’t imagine a woman saying to a guy who was angry, “Huh, backed up with sperm?” Or whatever.

Idio, you forget the part where your inability to stop drooling meant that you were still able to type.

to make fun of her by saying that you want to suck her tits

I’m not sure that the leering comments—which are still bad, I will overcompensatorily say—are “making fun of her,” though…

However, on second thought, the jokes involving as a premise that “if she likes breastfeeding so much maybe she’d feed me, teehee” are doing something different from the run-of-the-mill “nice tits” comment.

A bit of the Rusty Warren for ya:

Mammary Glands
Woah -oh- 0h
Mother Nature’s dairy delight!

You can make cream or butter
‘Cause it’s just a human udder!
A natural mammilian sight!

Mine weaned at 16 months of age, so, um, big deal that Hayek is actually doing what is recommended given that she has the control over her life to do it?

Warren also sang:

Bounce your boobies, let ‘em rock & roll
Nudge your knockers, keep ‘em hot, and so.
Just admit it gals, it sure feels great
to feel them swingin’, ooh and titilate!

So much for the repressed 40s, 50s and 60s!

of course they’re going to reach straight for their male privilege to lord her female body functions over her.

But wouldn’t that take the form of disgust or humiliation, rather than leering desire?  “She shouldn’t do that, it’s sick” is a different reaction than “I wish that was me,” even though both diminish the dignity of the whole person Salma Hayek.

I am still breastfeeding my son and I have had many people tell me that seeing a 2 year-old nursing is gross or sexual.  When you turn an act of nurturing a child into a sexual tableau you are making suggestions of pedophilia/exhibitionism, which is incredibly shaming for the mother you place in that position.

Sorry, as a nursing mother I find nothing complimentary about men expressing their desire to nurse from my breasts or telling me they still look beautiful despite the nursing. It is a reminder that my breasts are not my own, but sexual objects; it is a reminder that some random man has “forgiven” me for putting my breasts to any other use than as sexual playtoys.

As someone whose first thought, upon seeing those pictures, was “va va VOOM!” I don’t think *all* the people who post comments like those are trying to put Salma down.  Some, sure, but not all.

Well, yeah, the pic certainly got my attention.  But, you have to understand, I believe that what happens inside my skull is one thing, but posting demeaning comments on a forum is quite another.  Just about any woman will tell you that there’s light years of difference between being politely cruised and being creepily catcalled.  Much as I think Mrs. Hayek is looking quite nice these days, I am capable of retaining my senses of being polite, rather than contributing to a hooting chorus of primates.

I’m afraid that I just don’t get the whole breast thing.  Apparently I’m in the minority of males who just don’t find large breasts attractive (what’s next, sexy goiters?) and I find it horrifying that a woman would undergo surgery to plastic sacks crammed under their skin to try to make themselves more “attractive” to men looking for a new mama.  What really makes me shudder though is when I hear guys talking about sucking milk from a woman’s tits....WTF is THAT about??  I mean, isn’t the whole motherhood-sex connection just a wee bit Oedipal?

there’s no reason why anyone’s breasts ought to be the subject of a stranger’s comments, be they approving or disapproving.  But I’m not sure I see the shaming.

How do you feel, then, when men leer at and comment on your breasts (which I presume you have, from what you’ve written)? More precisely, because many of us are able to react with anger or dull apathy, how do you think they want you to feel?

There are a lot of trolls here who, I imagine, engage in this kind of behavior, but I think that even they, even behind the shield of internet anonymity, would not expect anyone to believe that they want or expect the woman to respond with arousal or delight. Guys who say this stuff to women want a response, and they want it badly (just try pretending you didn’t hear, and see how they take it.) What do you suppose they want, since we know it’s not anger or pleasure or gratitude? What seems unlikely to you about shame and fear?

Idio, why is a tableu of pictures of the bodacious tatas of a beautiful woman a “visual assault” which deserves a mindless comment?  Why does that mindless comment become Amanda’s fault and not your own?

Think about it.

history_mom:  I think that’s a great concise explanation of how what I was seeing as two strands of reaction might really be one, the “sexual tableau.” Just FYI, I hope that the second part about how it’s not a compliment wasn’t a reaction to something I wrote, because I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that any of these remarks should be considered compliments.

Amanda -
As I indicated in my post, I agree entirely about the leering and jeering.  Have to say I have never quite understood the American male obsession with breasts (too the exclusion of all else).  I certainly find them attractive, but that is hardly the primary feature I look for in a woman (which would be intelligence and humor).  American society does significantly seek to biologize women and thereby naturalize their social subjugation.  Worth noting that among the !Kung San (a mobile foraging society with gender equality), women frequently publicly ridicule men for their “shortcomings” and poor sexual performance.

It’s obscene! once a kid has TEETH, the breastfeeding can stop! THey can eat mushy food now!

This is so ignorant ... my kids DID NOT have teeth at 13 months.  They were also unable to drink cows milk and most formulas because they could not handle the lactose levels.

Traditionally, women nursed children for 18 months to 4 years depending on local circumstances.  My pioneer female ancestors cranked out kids almost exactly every 2 years like clock work because of nursing surpressing fertility for a time, no doubt.

Apparently I’m in the minority of males who just don’t find large breasts attractive (what’s next, sexy goiters?)

Yeah, but don’t worry, you’re in the majority of males who think expressing a visceral contemptuous disgust for the normal range of female bodies is the best way to get attention. And you’d be right, except there’s just so many of you that you tend to blend together after a while.

Oops, Mammary Glands was actually Kristin Lems: http://www.kristinlems.com/music-3.html

@ sophonisba* : Actually I’m male, and would self-identify as a straight male unapologetic feminist.  In this discussion I was more interested in trying to figure out where the lascivious comments (hot!) overlapped with the judgmental ones (gross!).  It initially seemed contradictory to have both be subsets of “shame” or “putting women in their place.” But history_mom’s explanation clarifies it for me quite well.

* Where does your nickname come from?  I’ve just been researching plays about Africa and Rome, and Sophonisba comes up a fair amount.

This is one of those times where cultural scripts screw over everyone.

It’s at the point where some men grow up thinking that this is an OK/appropriate way of complimenting a woman. Even if they use these kinds of responses as legitimately sincere praise, the cultural baggage of the hidden message is still there.

It’s a shame, because I’d love to see a world where people in general were comfortable enough with bodies and sexuality to be able to make these sorts of comments with sincerity and with no risk of backlash or negative objectification—towards their own sex or opposite, regardless of orientation.

I remember when I was a lonely teenager, someone commented to me that I had lips that girls would kill for. I wasn’t sure if she meant that I had particularly feminine lips or that girls would find my lips attractive, but either way I actually took some solace in it. I had a very poor self image at the time, and the comment was a positive experience for me. Even now, I like being objectified from time to time… but I also recognize that I can enjoy this in large part because I am a man and objectification for men doesn’t come with the hidden power messages that it does for women.

I hate this whole “I’m a caveman, that’s my caveman reaction!” Bullshit.  Yeah, because we womenz know nothin’ about teh science, and you’re a caveman!  Yikes…

It’s too bad the assholes who maks comments in bad faith have to ruin it for all the horny guys who know how and when to compliment you on your tits.

Raspberryjamba, I don’t think the commenter was using that for an excuse ... he was just differentiating his “ooh la la drool” unthinking and visceral response from his exercise of his greater and more mature ability to tell that part of himself to STFU.

Found this interesting, from a biological POV:

To make the case for natural selection operating on these fat stores, it is necessary to explain how fat deposition might increase the capacity of individuals with this trait to reproduce more successfully or produce more viable offspring than those without fat deposition. What, in other words, accounts for the selection of increased fat stores? And why did they grant some hominid females increased chances of survival?

Rose Frisch has demonstrated that it takes a certain amount of fat in relationship to lean body weight for the onset and maintenance of regular menstrual cycles (Frisch and McArthur 1974). In addition, studies show that there is a complex interaction between energy balance, body composition, and reproductive function (Huss-Ashmore 1980:82). The ability to store energy as fat has adaptive consequences both for maintaining physiological reproductive ability and for the successful rearing of offspring: both confer enhanced fitness (Huss-Ashmore 1980:84).

Females with greater reserves of adipose tissue were better able to satisfy the energy needs of their offspring through the fat laid down in the fetus, which could serve as a metabolic fuel in the newborn. Increased fat could allow a mother to produce a more adequate and abundant supply of milk for infants up to three years after birth. This may have been necessary as the period in which infants became dependent on their mothers for food increased. 

Although we do not completely understand the actual mechanisms of converting fat reserves to milk, there is indirect evidence that suggests that there is a conversion of internal fat stores to milk during nursing as well as the replenishment of these stores from subcutaneous deposits during childbearing years (Cant 1981:201). If increased infant dependency and scarce resources occurred in tandem, the contribution a mother would have to make to her child’s diet would have become proportionately more important.The evidence from contemporary hunter-gathers, such as the !Kung San, is that mothers often nurse their infants for up to three years after birth, significantly longer than among any other primate. Such long periods of nursing in our evolutionary past would have placed a considerable energy drain on the lactating mother.

Women in hunting and gathering societies today often have high workloads. If hominid females did as well, as is likely, the pressure for selection of fat storage would have increased.  Studies indicate that during periods of high workload, fat individuals use adipose stores while lean individuals are forced to sacrifice muscle just at the time when muscle is most needed for work. Sparing muscle during periods of high workload would enhance the work performance of an individual and the productive capacity of the entire society. The combination of a female’s high workload and increased energy demands from prolonged lactation could have exerted considerable stress for the selection of increased fat deposition.

As a breastfeeding mother (my daughter is 10 months old, and we have no intention of stopping yet), I find those comments sickeningly offensive.  Putting the feeding of a small child in the same sentence as something sexual is pretty sick.

The stigma against women breastfeeding in the west is a fascinating, if depressing, study in sciencists attempting to control and better female biology (by telling women initially that fomula was “better” and breastfeeding was somehow barbaric) followed by pressure to get back to it, once they realised quite how wrong they were - but in the meantime, the social damage was done, so that now that pressure is unrealistic and unhelpful.

It’s a veritable cornucopia of mysogyny.

Part 2:

To Every Season

Selection for fat deposition would have been most intense where energy resource fluctuation was large, regularly recurring, and of sufficient duration to invoke a physiological response. Such conditions are commonly encountered in seasonal habitats (Huss Ashmore 1980:87). A study by John Speth (1984), using geologic and ethnographic data, shows that the early hominid environment of east and south Africa exhibited just such seasonality. One indicator of seasonal stress would be loss of body weight. Speth points out that Gombe male chimpanzees experience up to 15% weight loss in the dry season and contemporary !Kung have been documented as experiencing approximately 6% weight loss during the late spring. It is highly probable that early hominids who possessed a much less well-developed technology than the !Kung, would also have faced periodic seasonal food stress and weight loss.

These conditions may have made fat reserves critical for hominid survival by acting as a buffer against caloric and nutritional deficiencies. And indeed, both human males and females exhibit exaggerated deposition of adipose tissue in comparison to the other primates. This fat deposition accounts for the great difference in birth weight between newborn humans and newborn living great apes. Nursing infants for longer than six months, the length of one plentiful season, would have placed stress on females, and it is likely that increased adipose tissue in the female, as compared to the male, is related to their role in child bearing and lactation.

Given the adaptation of early hominids to seasonal environmental conditions, it is extremely likely that the potential for some males and females to store fat increased their reproductive success. In other words, they would have been more likely to survive as well as bring their offspring to reproductive maturity. This is clearly natural selection at work, not sexual selection.

One last note of interest, which is in need of further investigation, is the relationship between estrogen and loss of estrus. Females with higher levels of estrogen reflecting increased fat deposition may have lost a discrete period of estrus. Although the physiological processes associated with loss of estrus are complex, experiments have indicated that the female motivation to mate is influenced by circulating levels of estrogen and testosterone. With increased levels of circulating estrogen, due to increased fat deposition, hominid females may have become willing to mate more often. It would become increasingly possible for females, lacking a discrete breeding season, to be pregnant at times of the year not necessarily correlated with plentiful environmental resources. This would have increased the selective pressure for fat stores even more. 

Alternative Scenarios

Since the publication of our article outlining our natural selection scenario, other researchers have built upon our ideas and expanded our model. For example, Pawlowski has recently argued that fluctuating food resources were not the only selective pressure operating on early hominids. In addition, he suggests that the large difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures characteristic of the open environment of early hominids might also account for the importance of fat storage to early hominid survival. Those individuals with decreased amounts of fur were able to withstand very high daytime temperatures, but would be vulnerable to the very cold nights of this environment. Those individuals with more fat were better able to withstand these hypothermic conditions. Pawlowski, too, argues that permanently enlarged breasts are a side effect of fat storage. Under conditions of early hominid development, fat storage would increase the likelihood of the survival of individuals possessing this trait.

Conclusions

Whatever the exact selective advantage of fat, it is clear that the evolution of permanent breast enlargement in human females need not be explained through their erotic appeal to men. What my colleagues and I hoped to show by presenting our explanation is that a reasonable argument based on natural selection could be developed. Our model is not as “sexy” as the explanations that see breasts exclusively as erotic attractors of men. But it avoids relying on such poorly substantiated concepts as differential parental investment, female dependency, and sexual selection, ideas that may reinforce twenty-first century notions about women and gender roles but have little, if no, empirical evidence to support them.

Link

I used to teach “Mommy and Me” classes, and one day this new kid who was four years old RUNS to where his mother was, RIPS her blouse up and starts trying to breastfeed in the class.  It was very uncomfortable for the mother.  I think the kid saw a baby being breastfed on the other side of the room and just went for it. 
Not to say children shouldn’t be breastfed until they’re ready to move on, I think it’s good for the mother and the child, but in this case, I could see how ncomfortable it was for the mother.  It almost felt like the objectification was coming from her son.  It made ME feel uncomfortable about my breast… Like I was some kind of vending-machine-in-waiting, or something. 
Maybe the objectification comes from early childhood, and we all objectify our mothers?

Sorry if my writing is not so great.  Amanda, I love your blog!

I believe that what happens inside my skull is one thing, but posting demeaning comments on a forum is quite another.

Well, I wouldn’t say anything like that if I thought Salma Hayek were reading this board.

Generally, evolution eliminates or reduces organic structures which serve no vital function in order to conserve resources.

I wouldn’t say breasts serve no function.  They get their size from fat deposits and fat is pretty useful.  And anyway, when a physical feature no longer serves a useful function it is as likely to start varying wildly in form as to atrophy; for instance, human height is not related to biological success, so we see a wide range of human height.  I’m not convinced that larger breasts resulted from sexual selection because I don’t think our ancestors ate enough fat to have large ones.  Yes, this is something I’ve thought a great deal about.

Sounds as if the mother you are describing was socially uncomfortable, not physically uncomfortable.  The problems there lies with the people around her, not the breastfeeding.

Dark Avenger -
I agree that there are strong evolutionary pressures on women to store body fat, but that does not adequately explain why that fat is concentrated, in part, in the breasts rather than elsewhere.  Among the !Kung San and some other African, southeast Asian, and Melanesian populations large amounts of body fat are deposited in the buttocks producing a condition known as steatopygea.  I also agree, as I indicated, that the sexual selection theory is inadequate and problematic as well.  At present we simply do not know why women have enlarged breasts.  It may well be a combination of factors rather than a single cause.  None of which justifies male objectification of female bodies.

I believe that what happens inside my skull is one thing, but posting demeaning comments on a forum is quite another.

Well, I wouldn’t say anything like that if I thought Salma Hayek were reading this board.

But you would say it where she wasn’t reading?  Or if it were ‘just us guys’ around to yuk it up over teh cleavage?  A big part of being a feminist man, I believe, is holding other guys to account and upholding some basic standards of behavior when women aren’t around to let the others know that they’re being pigs.

What really makes me shudder though is when I hear guys talking about sucking milk from a woman’s tits....WTF is THAT about??

John Doe (and anyone else questioning combining breastfeeding and sexuality), there is a community of adults that do engage in breastfeeding as a way of bonding with another human being and sometimes as a part of, or prelude to, sex.
There ARE people out there who genuinely desire this.  I’m sure it’s difficult to engage in this without some degree of objectification (after all, it is centered around an organ), but like all things sexual, it exists and those that seek it will continue with or without the approval of the public at large.

Sophonisba, I’m not keen on anorexia or obesity either, and apparently my pointing that out is a bid for attention.  We all (including you, probably) have a built-in “ideal of beauty” that is at slight variance with one other, and my own is pretty plebeian (mirroring ideals of western beauty that have fluctuated only slightly in a couple of thousand years).  Am I imperfect I don’t find the entire range of human physicality beautiful?  Yes, admittedly, I am.  In my own defense, however, I find real beauty to be something else altogether.

The current cultural obsession with breasts is a temporary one.  A walk through a decent museum will show that the fixation on hyper-tatas is a recent development and in my mind, equates to a rapid infantilization of males.  What, in our society, is the seed of this?  I’m not well versed enough in Jungian symbolism to break it all down, but women + huge breasts = food to many modern males, implying some sort of desperate hunger at some very deep level.

As creepifying as this is, even worse is that fact that women are being brainwashed into surgical options in order to act as enablers in this twisted shadow-play.  As anthropology, this is fascinating but as real world actions, the whole concept is bizarre and unpleasantly perverse. Yes, sexual body props have been in existence well before codpieces and bustles, but surgery to satisfy a psychological defect in males?  We all express ourselves in myriad ways, so if this works for you, go for it.  However, I’d suggest that the motivations behind such an expression need considerable reflection before such action is taken.

Yes, definitely socially uncomfortable.  But I don’t think the problem was the people around her… we’re very beastfeeding-friendly.  I think the discomfort came from having this child be so bratty about the breastfeeding.  A total little tyrant who wanted it then and there. 
Kinda turned me off of having children altogether. 

Yeah, the guys who catcall are just communicating with other guys, not with you.  Including the internet catcallers.  They just want to make like-minded friends, or impress the friends they already got.  Like yelling at the TV during footbal games.

raspberryjamba:

Breasts feed babies. Breasts also attract men. Sexual dimorphism—it’s a lizard-brain thing, and it’s also the elephant in the room that people are trying to suppress. I don’t think it’s sexist or disrespectful to say that as a man who likes women, when I see breasts, I think OMG BOOBIEZ!!!1!! However, neither do I believe that gives me license to disrespect or objectify the owner of said breasts or to make immature comments about them.

Look at it this way—have you ever seen any of the videos of GoGreen18 on YouTube? GoGreen/Laci is a young woman of 19, very beautiful, with very large breasts. She is also a top-notch vlogger with a great sense of humor and a lot of good stuff to say from the perspective of a college-age liberal atheist. There were two threads on Pharyngula about her, most of which seemed to revolve around whether or not dressing to accentuate her natural beauty damaged her credibility. Can we at least agree that it shouldn’t, and that smart and reasonable people should know better than to dismiss someone’s worth based on their looks?

We can’t delete sex from our daily interactions any more than we seem to be able to do so with race (cf Avenue Q, “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist"). What we can do is understand when such things are clouding are judgement inappropriately and compensate.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I have several friends who, for a variety of medical reasons, couldn’t produce enough milk or any milk, and had to supplement with formula. They were excoriated by the La Leche League folks who populate most hospitals. My best friend was in floods of tears, saying she was a bad mother because she didn’t have enough milk (her baby was a preemie, and she was recovering from a painful c-section), and some horrible instructor told her her baby was going to be stupid and ugly (yes, really, because their mouth muscles don’t develop the same way if they suck from a bottle) because she had to supplement with formula.
My mom, a social worker in a neonatal intensive care unit, would tell me horror stories about her patients with HIV (the virus can be transmitted to an HIV neg baby by breast milk) being harangued by lactation experts who obviously had no idea (and had no legal right to know) that was the last thing they should be bugging these poor terrified women about.
Bottom line—a woman’s breasts are never her own, whether she’s been cast as sex object or milk truck. Gaah.

Notorious P.A.T. -
Again, as I said above, storing fat has important advantages, but the problem is why is it stored in the breasts.  For a variety of reasons, a more even distribution of body fat over the entire body or in the hips and buttocks would seem to be more advantageous.  One of the major biological differences between women and men is that women distribute fat more evenly around the body (it is what gives women generally softer contours than men).  They also store larger concentrations in the buttocks and hips while men store it in the belly.  Enlarged breasts, like enlarged bellies (speaking from experience in the latter case), are more obstructive to daily activities than storing it in the buttocks or evenly about the body.

Brian X:  That’s exactly what is wrong with you!  YOU think that because breast feed babies and are attractive to you, then of course, THAT’S what breasts are for, and we breast-havers should feel flattered that babies want to nurse and men want to catcall. 

But the breasts are stuck to me, and in my view, you and your leering and the babies and their pawing are like flies swarming a cow.  To the flies, the cow is there for their sustenance and nothing else.  To the cow, the flies are a nuisance while it is trying to graze.  I imagine that if the flies had more power than the cow, then the cows would have to feel flattered by the flies that swarm her.

FlipYrWhig: The second half of my comment was not specific to you. I guess with the recent troll infestations I am starting to make preemptive comments to address the inevitable “but it was meant as a a COMPLIMENT, you are just a humorless feminist” rant.

Raspberryjamba:  I’m sure the mother was uncomfortable with her child’s display, but more likely because he was a little tyrant in general rather than that the breastfeeding was an issue.  Of course, she may have been one of the mothers who desperately wanted to stop BFing but did not want to “hurt” their child by refusing the breast.  One of the nasty side effects of the “breast is best” campaign is that it has given some women license to insult and/or judge other mothers as insufficiently sacrificing/nurturing for their child’s benefit if they don’t practice child-led weaning.  These are often the same women that shame other women for choosing not to have a natural labor.  As others have pointed out, the patriarchy gets you from both sides.

John Doe (and anyone else questioning combining breastfeeding and sexuality), there is a community of adults that do engage in breastfeeding as a way of bonding with another human being and sometimes as a part of, or prelude to, sex.

I’m aware of this and differentiate between individual sexual expression and societal movements.  What I object to is the way this “fashion” (and it really has to be regarded that way) is being pushed throughout our society.  We aren’t talking about hairstyles here, we’re talking about unrealistic body images that seem to become more exaggerated with each passing day.  Males are being encourage to idealize a feminine form that is well out of natural balance (and has a disturbing underlying psychological component) and females are being brainwashed into a sense of inadequacy, followed by increasingly common surgery to address that “inadequacy”.

As far as adult breast-feeding goes, to each his/her own.  I personally find the notion rather repulsive, but people find sexual satisfaction in all kinds of ways that differ from one another.  As I see it though, breast-feeding and large breast mania are bound up together and it is difficult to separate them in the way you imply they should be.

One of the reasons La Leche sprang up in the first place was because medical professionals, unlike my mothers’ doctor almost 50 years ago, didn’t discuss the benefits of breast-feeding with their patients.

“One-size-fits-all” approaches are the downside of advocacy groups, if they get to the point where every problem is perceived as a nail in need of righteous hammering.

Dark Avengger -
Thanks for the link by the way.  I will have to integrate this material into my anthropology of gender class this spring.  May even have the students read it (will have to see how it downloads).

Breast feeding is also a pretty effective natural birth control, as a having a breast feeding infant is fairly good (but imperfect) at limiting ovulation.  It helps space births, which has a lot of evolutionary advantages for a species like ours that puts a tremendous amount of resources into each offspring.

One of the very frustrating aspects of talking about evolutionary function, especially around sex and gender, is that we as a culture have a habit of reducing explanations of function into some weird singular purpose that has to circumscribe the totality of our behavior.  Thus ‘large breasts provided an evolutionary advantage because of X’ means ‘breasts are for X only.’ Which doesn’t make a lick of sense.  Evolutionary function explains why we inherited certain traits, not what they’re ‘for.’ Hell, the well endowed nurses my partner works with sometimes warm saline bags under their breasts.  (Always good for a laugh!) Their breasts are ‘for’ warming saline bags as much as their breasts are ‘for’ sexual attraction or feeding infants (if they’ve ever had one).

Loneoak -breastfeeding is even more effective in pre-industrial societies where women re less well fed and have lower proportions of body fat.  (Breastfeeding inhibits ovulation both through hormonal mechanisms and through reducing body fat reserves).  In many of these societies women do not menstruate every month even when they are not lactating.

Is breast feeding effective birth control, or is that a myth perpetuated by the catholic church so women will end up having more children?
I know lots of people who are less than one year apart from siblings, and I know my mom got accientally pregnant while breastfeeding. (Just look at Britney’s little sister!)
So, is breast feeding effective birth control, or is it like when the nuns at school say the rhythm method is the best?

I just want to also point out that breast size may or may not be correlated with the amount of fat inside said breast.  In some cases it’s fibrous tissue that contributes to size.  Breasts can be dense with this tissue, or they can be more adipose.  I’m sure there’s a lot of anecdata about women who lose a lot of weight but don’t lose weight in their breasts, which wouldn’t make sense if they were mostly fat.

raspberryjamba -
Breastfeeding inhibits, but does not prevent ovulation.  The effects arise from multiple sources including hormonal action and reduction of the mother’s store of body fat.  It is quite clear that the better fed (not necessarily nourished) the mother is, the less the effects on fertility reduction.  Rose Frisch (cited above) and others have shown that among mobile foragers and some subsistence cultivators it has a significant impact and contributes to lengthening birth spacing.  It does not seem to have a comparable effect for women in intensive agricultural or industrial societies.

dmliddy -
It is worth noting that many, but not all, competitive women body builders experience significant breast reduction.

Honestly…What kid could give those up?

sooo hot

and people fight to ban breastfeeding in public…

Suddenly , I’m in the mood for chocolate-chip cookies… etc. etc.

What fascinates and disturbs me are the men who seek any and every opportunity to revel in the Othering of the female body, through the traditional form of the back-handed compliment.  It’s hands down the favorite way to harass women and put them in their place in our culture.... 

I think this type of behavior might represent some kind of struggle between attraction to the woman’s body, hatred of the woman’s body for the potential loss of control that this attraction could cause, and a generalized misogyny/hatred of women. It’s basically a crappy way of dealing with sexual attraction.

No comment from Amanda about Salma Hayek’s decision to constantly wear clothing that can’t help but bring attention to her ample bosom (see photos above) or her taking acting roles that play up a sexy image.

As an infertile who has spent too much time looking at fertility charts and knows several breastfeeding women who were trying to conceive, overall nursing makes ovulation come later than it normally would, or erratically, and decreases the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. For those of you who don’t know, the luteal phase is the period between ovulation and menstruation, where progesterone fluffs up the lining of the uterus to make it fit to accept a fertilized egg. If your luteal phase is too short, or you don’t have enough progesterone, the zygote doesn’t implant OR the lining sloughs off before implantation is complete, causing an early miscarriage.

I really would have been better off not knowing about Salma Hayek’s nursing habits. Not because of any grossness, but because how she raises her kids is none of my business. Maybe I just don’t get People magazine culture.

I think some of the boys in this thread are trying to describe the inner conflict between the “hubba hubba” conditioned reaction and the conscious mind that knows that women are people. The positive side is that we acknowledge it’s wrong. The negative is that we’re even giving it that much airtime.

It is a reminder that my breasts are not my own, but sexual objects;…

??? Can’t they be both?  Is there some kind of legislation that removes your title to them?

I think it’s perfectly okay to react “hubba hubba” to a PHOTO of someone, male or female.  When you encounter the person, it’s a different story.

Dan - who cares what she wears or why?  Her wearing low cut blouses does not make it OK to say disgusting, immature, offensive things about her.  You’re a goddamn grown-up.  Control yourself around an attractive woman.

Sophonisba, I’m not keen on anorexia or obesity either, and apparently my pointing that out is a bid for attention....  Am I imperfect I don’t find the entire range of human physicality beautiful?

John Doe, of course it is OK to not be attracted to everybody.  I’m not particularly attracted to lots of different types of guys.  But I don’t feel that it is OK to denigrate their unattractive features by comparing them to things people think are “gross”.  Some men (and some women) have this nasty habit of saying what boils down to “I’m not a sexist jerk because I hate skinny girls/girls with big boobs/blonde girls/stupid girls.  They’re gross!” They don’t seem to realize that its just as demeaning to women to hate the skinny ones with big boobs as it is to hate the curvy chicks or the ones with A-cups.  The solution is to not hate them at all.  Just go with what attracts you and politely decline that which doesn’t.

Dan, there’s no good reason why being sexually attractive in a public kind of way warrants demeaning comments or anything to be said about breast feeding.  Breast feeding does not exclude one from sexiness and sexiness does not exclude one from breast feeding.  That’s kinda the whole point about Amanda insisting that women are full human beings and only sexists try to enforce behavior as if they weren’t.

They don’t seem to realize that its just as demeaning to women to hate the skinny ones with big boobs as it is to hate the curvy chicks or the ones with A-cups.

Yup. You don’t get a get-out-of-being-a-tosser-free card just because your tastes differ from the norm. You get it by acknowledging that people’s value is not determined by whether you find them attractive. (Well, it helps.)

Is breast feeding effective birth control, or is that a myth perpetuated by the catholic church so women will end up having more children?

According to the OBGYN in my living room*, exclusive nursing every 4-6 hours is approximately 70% effective as birth control.  So better than nothing (or the rhythym method), but not nearly as good as actual birth control.

*okay, I’m actually in his living room

Breastfeeding is pretty decent birth control for some women (at least for a while), and totally ineffective for others.  If I relied entirely on breastfeeding to space my children, they’d be born 2.5 to 3 years apart, which isn’t too bad so far as it goes.  I’d have a whole lot more than two, though.  I know other women whose cycle returns pretty much as soon as the post-childbirth bleeding quits; I’m very lucky in that mine stayed away until 18 months with kid#1 and 22 months with kid#2.  (I breastfed #1 until she was 2 1/2 and #2 until she was a little over 3.)

One of the things that always blows me away about these discussions is how intensely regional the attitudes are.  I live in Minneapolis.  I breastfed my children in public when they were toddlers and did not use a shawl or a drape because the kids would pull it off; I was reasonably discreet, I think (I mean, I was wearing a shirt, and I would arrange the shirt around the kid to cover skin), but if someone got an occasional flash of nipple as the kid popped off I was not going to lose sleep over it.  I was never harassed or even stared at, though a few strangers did randomly stop to give me props.  Women in other states talk about being hassled for nursing newborns under a shawl or blanket and it boggles my mind.

There are so many other body parts that are both functional and recreational and we seem to be able to cope with that fact.  I think some of the weirdness surrounding breasts is that there was a period of several decades when almost no women breastfed, and so it makes some men profoundly uncomfortable that something they think of as a sexual part is used to feed babies.  (It kind of reminds me of that article from years ago about the men who saw their babies born and were SO TRAUMATIZED that they were NEVER ABLE TO HAVE SEX WITH THEIR WIVES AGAIN.  I thought those men sounded like whiny drama queens, and I’d say that the men who get all “hubba hubba ack eek!” over breastfeeding are cut from the same cloth.)

Hey Dan,
You’re saying that Salma is wearing clothes that call attention to her boobs, but at least in one of those pics, she’s wearing a brown sweater, and her boobs still look great.  I don’t think there is anything she COULD wear that would not call attention to her boobs.  Maybe this is great for guys like you who like to blame women and their bodies for anything from rape, catcalling, and domestic violence, to men’s stupidity, traffic jams and bad grades in high school.

I don’t think any of the comments are demeaning, except to the commenter. They are just stupid comments. They don’t threaten anyone, they don’t harm anyone. They are just dumb. Moronic, sophmoric, silly, foolish comments.

No one is trying to “enforce” any “behavior”.

Ay yi yi.

And if a man sees a woman as a sexual object it does NOT mean that he also does not appreciate her as a human being. It is not an either-or proposition. To say that a man sees a woman as a “piece of meat” really oversimplifies things in a grotesque way. It is more complicated than that.

Denise, for what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure you’ve mischaracterized what I was saying. I could find a large breasted woman perfectly attractive, but it wouldn’t be the size of her breasts attracting me (where did “hate” enter this conversation, by the way?).  To my way of seeing it, I’m not denigrating anyone, I’m simply pointing out a difference in personal taste to a societal trend.

Pepito, I’m not about to start acknowledging people’s value based on whether I find them attractive or not.  That’s pretty ridiculous. Everyone has some opinion on physicality, particularly stylistic options (you may have no qualms in telling people that you find a handlebar mustache absurd, for example), yet this is no comment on the value of anybody.

I’ve noticed something interesting and telling in many threads like this about women’s bodies on feminist blogs: men like to show up (by “show up” I mean they’re not always regular commenters) and pontificate about what they find attractive and what they find gross, even though nobody (as far as I can tell) asked. I think that’s what sophonisba may have been getting at in terms of wanting attention. Yes, you’re technically free to tell us what you like and don’t like, but it’s not really what we’re talking about. A less nice way to put this would be that no one cares.

To the uninformed person who made the comment above about kids with teeth being able to eat mushy food… yes, my little girl with cerebral palsy was able to eat purees when she was one, but not enough to get all the nutrients she needed.  We made up the rest with breastmilk until she weaned (at fourteen months), and then she moved on to formula.

Every parent makes the nutrition decisions that are best for their child and themselves, and they shouldn’t be subject to public censure unless they’re doing something abusive.  Breastfeeding a one year old is NORMAL.

Also, when I saw the pictures of Salma Hayek I did admire how beautiful she is and I love her figure, but I don’t at all understand how that would shut down anybody’s ability to relate to her primarily as a human being.  I’m mostly attracted to men, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any man so compellingly attractive that I had to immediately drop everything and act like a total asshole.

I read an article a while back that linked to a youtube video that showed a woman who was still breastfeeding her daughters, one was 5, and one was 8. She was an old hand of doing it discretely, but it felt sorta strange to look at, and I breastfed one of my children.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxv6R9fUO74

The comments are about what you’d expect, too....

Annejumps, the normal reaction to an opinion you don’t care about is....not to comment.

No, but I totally see what annejumps is saying.  Why do guys do this?  Do they want us to say: “Oh, good for you!”, or maybe they think they’re better because they don’t like big boobs?  Who knows…

What gets me is that if you take the misogyny at face value, you will not want to have very much to do with males.  There are very many males who delude themselves that women are attracted to the misogynist, but I am not, and those who think clearly are certainly not.  So you have these men who seem to want to persist in a direction that will only draw to them the sick and the dying among women.

raspberryjamba - rape and domestic violence is not the same as a stupid comment on a blog. Really. It is not the same. Different. Different as cheese and an airplane. Excusing a dumb sexual comment is not a slippery slope to justifying rape.

And annejumps - I didn’t realize that Pandagon was a feminist blog. Is it, Amanda? I’ve been reading (and enjoying) it for months. If it is, does that make me a feminist? Gay? A spy from the male-dominated, oppressive society?

Yeah, but don’t worry, you’re in the majority of males who think expressing a visceral contemptuous disgust for the normal range of female bodies is the best way to get attention. And you’d be right, except there’s just so many of you that you tend to blend together after a while.

sophonisba, this “mammarily gifted” lady thanks you from the bottom of her heart for that.  I was trying to think of a withering response to that guy’s asshattery but nothing was forthcoming.

You know, it IS possible to love, respect and appreciate a woman as an equal adult human being while simultaneously saying to her, “Hey, nice rack”.

I think some of the boys in this thread are trying to describe the inner conflict between the “hubba hubba” conditioned reaction and the conscious mind that knows that women are people.

Again, speaking only for myself, I like looking at those pictures above because they are pictures of a person.  If someone made a rubber or wax copy of Salma that looked exactly like her, I wouldn’t be interested because I’m into people, not things.

storing fat has important advantages, but the problem is why is it stored in the breasts

I had a professor who hypothesized that women’s chests evolved over the years to look like/remind men of buttocks.

Oh, and if big chests provided such a great evolutionary advantage, then just about all women would have big chests.

Notorious P.A.T. -

I have heard that one about breasts and buttocks as well (comes from the notorious sexist asshat Desmond Morris), but never really bought it.  You also make a good point about variability of breast size.

annejumps, exactly.

And as for you “I don’t like X on women” guys—not only do we not care what you like, we don’t want to know.  It’s an overshare.  By sharing your opinions on women’s bodies you imply that we’re supposed to be interested in every man’s assessment of our bodies, no matter who he is or where he is or whether we would ever ourselves want to date or fuck him, and...no.

I’m built like Calista Flockhart (not quite as thin, but then who is) and I don’t like hearing from men that skinny girls are ugly.  I know it’s supposed to make heavier women feel better, but it really isn’t cool.  There’s no reason to dump on women who look like me.  If you don’t find me attractive, don’t date me.  Jeez.

No comment from Amanda about Salma Hayek’s decision to constantly wear clothing that can’t help but bring attention to her ample bosom (see photos above) or her taking acting roles that play up a sexy image.

*headdesk*

Look, dude, you don’t get to make disgusting comments about a woman just because she wears sexy clothes, especially when discussing something that has NOTHING TO DO WITH her clothes.

dick jokes resemble, to my mind, lolcats

I was reminded of the wistful limerick in a Kurt Vonnegut book:

There was an old man from Stamboul,
Who soliloquized thus to his tool:

‘’You took all my wealth

And ruined my health

And now you won’t pee, you old fool.”

What ties erotic attraction and baby-nourishing together, in my opinion, is that the shapes of young women’s bodies signal their fertility. Attraction leads to sex, which leads to babies, who need sustenance. There’s nothing inconsistent about that.

The thing about guys like Dan is that they’ll tell us to lighten up about the disgusting comments made about Hayek.  Then, and often in the same breath, they will piteously bemoan all the “male-bashing” in the media because women go on Dr. Phil and complain about their husbands being messy or because the dude on King of Queens is portrayed as a buffoon. 

BTW, the Google ad on the bottom of this page features “Elite Online Dating” - Dating for financially stable men and attractive single women.  Join us.

John Doe, here is what you don’t seem to be getting:

You are telling every woman reading this thread that you assume that if their breasts are over a certain size (whatever means “large” to you), we look gross, we probably engage in kinky adult breast-feeding, and you will assume on sighting us that we had maiming surgery because we are so insanely desperate to please men who lack your sophisticated tastes.

HEAR ME! I hit a C cup at age 12 and they slowly continued to grow.
Nevertheless, I am intelligent and a feminist. I hate being thought of as sexy or worse, too sexy, because I have a body that triggers judgmental attitudes. I am a serious person. The only plastic surgery I have seriously considered is breast reduction.
And you are every bit as bad, or worse than, the men who leer and catcall.
You want me to know I am UGLY and should feel nothing but SHAME that these animal mammary glands are stuck to me. You let me-- and every large breasted woman here-- know that you have smugly judged us to be kinky.
Well, hell, the gay men here don’t try to cause us women the body shame you flung in our case, and they don’t find any of us sexy. So it’s not just that you don’t find us attractive-- it’s that you are shaming us-- the exact thing that the original post was about. You just found a different way to phrase it.

You know, it IS possible to love, respect and appreciate a woman as an equal adult human being while simultaneously saying to her, “Hey, nice rack”.

Dude, most of us here are aware of context.  I don’t think anybody has suggested that you shouldn’t talk dirty to your girlfriend. 

Salma Hayek is not your girlfriend.

Elaine Morgan, in her book “The Descent of Woman”, suggests that larger breasts come from the need of babies to reach the breast. An ape baby holds on to the mother’s fur to hang on around her nipple to feed. But human women don’t have body hair to grip, and a mother either holds the baby, or sets it on her lap. A baby may have trouble holding itself up to nurse long, but if a breast droops down closer to a comfortable level, will get a chance to drink more and thrive.

And annejumps - I didn’t realize that Pandagon was a feminist blog. Is it, Amanda? I’ve been reading (and enjoying) it for months. If it is, does that make me a feminist? Gay? A spy from the male-dominated, oppressive society?

In response to a thread with the feminism tag.

Obvious troll is obvious.

The fascinating thing about these conversations is that only very rarely is there any discussion about how and when it is appropriate for a man to see - and respond to - a woman in a sexual manner.

Selma Hayek is a very attractive woman, and probably a very nice person.  I have no reason to believe that I’ll ever be within 100 meters of her, much less have a chance to become a close personal friend.  If I did happen to meet Ms. Hayek and become a close personal friend I would undoubtedly be pleased simply because Ms. Hayek is probably a very nice person.

But, how does one move from simply being a friend to someone whose romantic interest is valued and appreciated?  In posts like this I see no approval for responding to a woman as sexually desirable, and lots of preference for dealing with men who do not respond to women sexually.  Since the world is full of intelligent women with wonderful personalities, strong leadership skills, and other traits that I like my friends to have this state of (lack of) affairs is fine most of the time....but I would like to get married someday....

(Saying ‘just treat women like human beings and they will be falling all over you’ is not useful.  Getting lots of female attention is, as the previous sentence describes, quite easy to do by being polite, respectful, and interested in what she has to say - but knowing when it is acceptable to assume that the interest is sexual is very very unclear.  And, in particular, if I have developed a good friendship with a woman I do not want to risk that friendship by being inappropriately sexual.....but apparently many women think that a man should ‘make the first move’.)

raspberryjamba:

You seem to have this conception that men aren’t allowed to be sexual beings without the explicit approval of the person they’re fantasizing about. You seem to think that a mechanism that evolved before the dinosaurs existed is not what it it evolved to be. Above all, you seem to think that you somehow have the right to exist in a bubble of perfect rights and complete comfort and that any attempt to defend or even explain what you see as an unconscionable encroachment on your personal space is an attack on women. I have a right to like boobs. So do you, if you happen to swing that way. What neither one of us has is the right to treat the owner of said boobs as equivalent to the objects on her chest. As a man of minimal social skill, that’s very difficult for me sometimes, but I try. I feel safe in saying that pretty much all men (even, I’m sure, a lot of gay men) have to deal with this, and some are better at it than others. Please direct your dislike to those who don’t even try.

dan, you must not read this blog ever if you have to question whether it’s got a feminist angle. and you’re saying that straight men can’t be feminists. hm. i guess that tells us all we need to know about you right there.

Donna - I am not telling you to “lighten up about the disgusting comments made about Hayek.” I am trying to explain the mindset that will make those comments and I sincerely believe that there is no animosity, just stupidity. And it is disconcerting when comparisons are made to rape, etc. or people feel the need to explain why breasts exist.

“Then [Dan] will piteously bemoan all the “male-bashing” in the media because women go on Dr. Phil and complain about their husbands being messy or because the dude on King of Queens is portrayed as a buffoon.” No, because a) I don’t look for evidence of male-bashing in every comment I hear, and b) my self-esteem isn’t based on what I see on TV. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone seriously bemoan male-bashing. If Samantha or Carrie make some snide comment about a man or men in general, I am not personally insulted.

Women in hunting and gathering societies today often have high workloads. If hominid females did as well, as is likely, the pressure for selection of fat storage would have increased.  Studies indicate that during periods of high workload, fat individuals use adipose stores while lean individuals are forced to sacrifice muscle just at the time when muscle is most needed for work.

I’d have a problem with that idea - the female breast imposes significant problems for movement, whereas fat deposits elsewhere (such as the buttocks or waist) are easier to deal with.  Unless there was a significant benefit to having breasts, why wouldn’t female fat deposits be more like those of males?

It almost felt like the objectification was coming from her son.

Er, I’d say it was pretty much a given that four year olds regarde their parents as “objects” rather than “people”.

No, but I totally see what annejumps is saying.  Why do guys do this?

Possibly because what (mostly) women are saying in these threads jars with their internal experience, and since this is a discussion thread, they’re trying to convey that what you are saying just doesn’t add up.

Hey chibi - like I said, I read it every day. A feminist angle is not the same thing as a feminist blog. And as a straight guy, I can handle a feminist take on things. But this post seems to boil down to: men like boobies and make stupid comments, so men are evil.

I know that is not exactly what Amanda and most of the commenters are saying, but it comes across that way.

Hooray for Salma. She’s made a good choice for her baby. I don’t see why breasts can’t be seen in some contexts as sexual, and in other contexts as nutritional, and at times a little bit of both. No big deal here. I’m mature and confident enough to understand the difference and react appropriately one way or the other.

And I think the whole “breasts are feeding babies, they are not sex objects” line is a bit puritanical. Why can’t we (both men and women) have it both ways? I understand the difference, why can’t all these assholes commenting about Hayek understand it too.

You might as well say the same thing about women’s hips and butts. Their hips are angled a little outward to accomodate a successful birth, and they have a little more fat there as part of their genetic heritage to sustain a successful pregnancy. Am I therefore required to abstain from noticing that a woman has a nice ass because it is “for” her reproductive fitness? I think not! I merely have not to be a jerk and not stare too long or make unwanted comments.

Ditto Bacopa

Oh, I meant to add this too. Back when Dettwyler was at TX A&M;she published a study comparing dovelopmental milestones in other mammals to human development to try to see what might be a “natural” age to wean. 13 months is very much on the low end and 4 years is not that odd by her reckoning. Link to her original paper can be found here:

http://www.kathydettwyler.org/

The fascinating thing about these conversations is how they always devolve into anxious male hand-wringing about how best to get laid.

You mean I can’t just say “Nice tits?” What do I do, feminists? OH GOD WHAT DO I DO?

Samantha, your claim that I’ve stated that big breasts are gross, that big breasted women are involved in kinky breastfeeding and that they are big breasted due to surgery because of their insane desire to please men....implies that you have a serious reading comprehension problem. Read my posts again and sound the words out if that helps.

I’m perfectly willing to debate my position but not to satisfy someone’s need for recreational sophistry.  Allow me to condense and clarify: I am objecting to something societal, not personal.  I feel the same way about the pressuring of young women to have breast enlargement as I do about pressuring them to be ultra-thin.  It’s perverse and destructive.  How this is twisted in your mind into me attempting to shame you (and all large breasted women) for having large breasts is something I’ll turn over to you to explain.

You mean I can’t just say “Nice tits?”

You mean hearing those words doesn’t make you leap directly onto the speaker’s cock? Come on, it can’t just be me.

WTH is going on with this infestation of guys who want to be able to publicly exclaim over a woman’s breasts, and then get in a huff when we tell them that such things are unacceptable, especially in a feminist space?

No one here is saying you can’t find breasts attractive.  No one is saying you can’t have (private) fantasies about women you find attractive.  But to publicly comment about how the photos shut down your brain, especially when the attractiveness of Salma Hayeck is not the subject of conversation, is stepping over the line.

What is it about a thread about breastfeeding and the pressures women face that makes you think that your comments about the sexiness of women is appropriate?

(Discussions of why breasts evolved the way they did is an interesting tangent, and completely different than the ZOMG BOOOBZ!!! feel from some of these idiots.  Just to clarify.)

I sincerely believe that there is no animosity, just stupidity.

And there’s just stupidity in many people who joke about how n*ggers are shiftless or orientals are inscrutable, or jews are always interested in money. But all of those comments function to enforce racism, and all of them come from (perhaps ignorantly) buying into a belief system based on animosity.  Same with sexism and comments assuming that women’s breasts are about men’s interest in them.

And in 2008, almost 2009, it’s pretty hard to claim that you’ve been living in a monastery on Iapetus all these years, which is why you had no idea about proper behavior.

But, how does one move from simply being a friend to someone whose romantic interest is valued and appreciated?

My favorite trick is to treat women as a monolithic bloc, rather than as individuals. That normally goes down really well.

Brian and Dan - it’s OK to have fantasy lives. It’s not OK to tell strangers about your fantasy lives. Really not fair on the strangers.

As a non-breeding male, I have no dog in this fight.

But I want attention.
So thanks for reading