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Last night, I uploaded some pictures from our weekend onto my real FB page. This was one of them*:
We had just gotten done playing in the fountain, so my hair is not exactly spectacular, but I still love this picture.
This morning, I saw that I had some photo comments so I hopped on quick to check them. In addition to a couple of lovely comments from friends, someone I thought was a friend wrote this:
"really!! i thought the birthing pictures were enough."
And I thought, "She must be kidding." I figured maybe it was a *sarcasm font* sort of moment. But I thought about who it was coming from - a childless woman from the pretty redneck area of Michigan where I grew up. She probably wasn't being sarcastic.
And then I got rather pissed. What the hell is peoples' problem with breastfeeding? It can't be the show of skin because people post all manner of bikini and boudoir shots online without giving it a second thought. Nope, its just the backward way that people in our nation view bodies, birth, and breastfeeding. Everything is sexualized. Anything that isn't sexualized is sterilized, sanitized, and marginalized.
This is not going to be a long exposition on how ill our culture is when it comes to birth, breastfeeding, parenting, and body image. If you want me to direct you to some, I'd be happy to. They're all over the internet. It's a well known, well documented, and very sad fact.
This post is just to vent a little steam, and to say 2 things:
If you don't like my effing pictures, don't freaking look at them.
If you can't seperate breastfeeding from sex and obscenity, you need to take a hard look at your own self image and psyche.
The woman who wrote this, as I've already said, is childless and obviously thoroughly uneducated about motherhood. But that's no excuse, especially considering the foul, sexually explicit jokes her fiance (who used to be completely in love with me, by the way**) posts all over FB.
This one was just totally out of left field. I get that there are probably some people who weren't too excited about the birth pictures, but that's fine, they didn't have to look at them. All of them were in albums, so it's not like they posted straight to the newsfeed or anything (same with the pic above), so one would actually have to open the album to see them. I just don't get people who take issue with breastfeeding photos. Thankfully, after that I got 20 or so positive comments on that same photo (but you can't see those comments because they're on my "real" FB page).
*I intend to post more of them in a future post.
** We had a very intense star-crossed sort of thing in high school and a bit while I was in college. We were very close friends and at one point he confessed his deep feelings for me in a very moving letter, but I was involved with someone else at the time and we all know how I feel about cheating. It was hard, though, because I had feelings for him, too. A couple years later we got back in touch, but he ended up cutting off communication with me, saying he was in a new relationship and didn't think there was any way he could make things work with someone else while still talking to me. I told him I was 500 miles away and involved with someone else, so I wasn't much of a threat. He wrote back simply, "You'll always be a threat."
I'm tempted to see if that email is still floating around the internet somewhere. It was all very poingniant and dramatic. Our relationship was nothing but a series of near misses over a number of years, but I came away with some great memories. I still smile every time I hear Drops of Jupiter by Train. It was on the radio in his car one night when he gave me a ride home from work, and he did everything by skywrite that the somg was about me. Sadly, I was dating a friend of his at the time.
We've recently gotten in touch. I think we've both grown and changed enough over the years that I am indeed not a threat, and I certainly can't ever imagine dating him now - even if I were single. He's no longer really my type and he's happily engaged. But he's still a great friend, and the history is still there.
All that said, the girlfriend would probably be irate if she ever read this, even though it's just whistful nostalgia, so I may end up taking it down eventually.
*I intend to post more of them in a future post.
** We had a very intense star-crossed sort of thing in high school and a bit while I was in college. We were very close friends and at one point he confessed his deep feelings for me in a very moving letter, but I was involved with someone else at the time and we all know how I feel about cheating. It was hard, though, because I had feelings for him, too. A couple years later we got back in touch, but he ended up cutting off communication with me, saying he was in a new relationship and didn't think there was any way he could make things work with someone else while still talking to me. I told him I was 500 miles away and involved with someone else, so I wasn't much of a threat. He wrote back simply, "You'll always be a threat."
I'm tempted to see if that email is still floating around the internet somewhere. It was all very poingniant and dramatic. Our relationship was nothing but a series of near misses over a number of years, but I came away with some great memories. I still smile every time I hear Drops of Jupiter by Train. It was on the radio in his car one night when he gave me a ride home from work, and he did everything by skywrite that the somg was about me. Sadly, I was dating a friend of his at the time.
We've recently gotten in touch. I think we've both grown and changed enough over the years that I am indeed not a threat, and I certainly can't ever imagine dating him now - even if I were single. He's no longer really my type and he's happily engaged. But he's still a great friend, and the history is still there.
All that said, the girlfriend would probably be irate if she ever read this, even though it's just whistful nostalgia, so I may end up taking it down eventually.
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