NORMALIZING BREASTFEEDING

“Normalizing breastfeeding” is partly about us enlightening ourselves about how unfortunate it is to stigmatize something so primal and health-inducing and intuitive (of course, breastfeeding if you WANT to and CAN—so many women want to and cannot for different reasons and it can be very painful emotionally…I believe every choice a mother makes is the one and only choice to be made for herself).

Most cultures look at this resistance of the most primordial and existentially-made-available-miracle-of-an-act as sheer lunacy. They would never question this neutral and life-sustaining act. They would only support it, or better yet, mundanely-assume it. I wish for those of us whom are terrified of breastfeeding to get to a place where we barely notice.

But, partly, this would require that we heal our collective sexual wounding. The wounding experienced in childhood or in adulthood, both. In the case of being adverse to breastfeeding, or the idea of breasts in general, (often in the form of brutally and misogynistically objectifying breasts, or singularly reducing them to their ability to sexually titillate (pardon the pun!) versus celebrating the beauty and miracle and FUNCTION of them). My wish for us in America, and anywhere around the world that reduces them and their function, would be to gently but surely address our many traumas that show up as divisiveness and violence toward our bodies, toward women, and toward ourselves….and thereby each other.

–Alanis Morissette in response to questions about why breastfeeding is such a hot topic in some countries and not in others.