Normally when a friend sends me a link to a news article it’s done knowing full well what side of the given news issue I will fall on and generally they just want to see me go stark raving mad into a rant complete with foaming at the mouth. On Friday I got an email request to blog about a certain news article and at the bottom it said, “I don’t care which side you take. I just want to see you tackle this.”
“If you don’t care what side I take, why do you want to see me blog about it?”
“Really, because I’m curious to see your reaction to it. Now dance, Monkey!”
I looked at the title and my eyes rolled into the back of my head, “Breast-Feeding Doll Too Real for Comfort?” I read the whole article from end to end. I have no strong feelings about a doll for children that simulates breast-feeding either way. It was the controversy about ‘over-sexualizing’ young girls that made my ass twitch.
However, a viral video demonstration on YouTube has been met with remarks that the doll is over-sexualizing young girls, or forcing girls to grow up too quickly, or teaching young girls about a natural part of motherhood.
Yes, breast-feeding requires breasts. In our Puritanical culture those evil things, which shall not be mentioned, are generally viewed as naughty pillows. They should be covered at all times for all reasons least the men folk go stir crazy at the sight and send young children screaming with blood streaming from the eyes. But breasts are also used by women to feed infants and though stimulating the milk to flow can have a very similar bodily response there is nothing sexual about it. Nothing! It would be like saying a job interview is the same as sex because your heart rate goes up and you sweat a little during both. Unless you’re a porn star or regularly date people seeking a sugar-daddy/sugar-mamma, sex and job interviews are not on the same playing field. And I hope you’re not sweating that much during interviews. By overreacting to anything remotely connected to sexual things in their twisted adult head these stupid dolts are just making sex a more forbidden fruit in the future and a much more enticing one at that.
“I heard people talking about it but, honestly, I thought it was a joke,” said Ilina Ewen, a writer for the Deep South Moms and her own blog Dirt and Noise.
“There are just things that I think kids are too little to understand,” she said.
Ewen worried that if her two boys, ages 4 and 6, saw the toy, they would be confused because neither had been breast-fed.
Yet Ewen admits she has seen many young girls mimic the behavior after watching their mothers nurse their infant siblings.
“They don’t understand they just see other moms doing that. Let kids use their imagination and play with a doll and not deal with what it can do,” Ewen said. “There’s no need to turn it into something that’s anatomically correct. Not at this age.”
The doll itself is as anatomically correct as any other on the market. This doll only works when the girl puts on a shirt that has flowers where her nipples are located. Unlike other dolls that girls pretending to breast-feed might actually put under their own shirt, this method is hardly anatomically correct. I have never in my live met a woman with flower nipples. Nor have I ever heard of a woman successfully breast-feeding a baby with flowers over her nipples.
I doubt it matters if children were breast-fed themselves or not. I stopped breast-feeding Sophia completely at about sixteen months. I seriously doubt she’ll remember if she was bottle-fed or breast-fed when she’s playing with dolls as a four to six year-old and to say a child doesn’t understand is a cop-out for ones own sensitivities to anything perceived as loosely connected to sex. Children do understand. They know A LOT, and trying to protect innocents really doesn’t serve the child well. It creates a category of information the child will learn never to ask questions about in order to not upset the ‘innocent child’ view of their stupidly sensitive parent.
Psychologist Jay Reeve, CEO of the Apalachee Center in Tallahassee, Fla., said Bebe Gloton’s realism goes too far.
Of course, children have played ‘parent’ with dolls for centuries, but this new twist seems to focus not on what babies are like as much as jumpstarting a focus on breast-feeding,” Reeve said. “I’m always a little disturbed by toys, games, or products that have the impact of accelerating childhood identification with being a full-blown adult.”
Is this a child psychologist? How can he not see the irony in his own response? That is exactly what role playing is all about! It’s moving into adulthood. Dumb-ass. I think giving an actual infant to a little girl and expecting her to give 100% of the care that would be accelerating adulthood to being a full-blown adult. It’s the perceived sex-thing about the doll isn’t it? I wonder what Freud would say about this?
Though I don’t care about the breast-feeding non-issue I still wouldn’t buy this doll for Sophia. I agree with the professor at the end of the article.
…toy expert, professor and author Diane Levin, said the problem with Bebe Gloton isn’t the breast-feeding. Levin has a problem with any toy that limits the play to a single activity.
“It’s not good for children to have everything structured for them,” said Levin…
… “As kids get used to instructive toys, they need more structured toys,” Levin said. “We take the creativity away.”
This is one of the reasons why I limit the battery operated toys Sophia has. The other reason is that I don’t want to have to buy millions of batteries, and third and most importantly I think any doll with any mechanical movements are fuckin’ creepy! Think Chucky.
