Simcha Fisher Savages Karla Erickson

For the humor-impaired, the title of this post is a joke. Anyhow, here's Erickson's post against breastfeeding, and here is Simcha Fisher's rebuttal. Encapsulating quote from Erickson, a "Gender Studies" instructor: "Next time I won’t breastfeed because it sets up a gendered division of who does what early into parenting. It provides an infrastructure for an unequal distribution of the work (and rewards) of parenting." Also, "One of the fathers [who came to talk to this lady's class] said that after their first child they bottle-fed their children because it was the only way to work against the gender disparities in the parenting process. At the time it sounded kind of harsh – like social engineering in the face of the well-proven benefits of breastfeeding."

Might I suggest that her gut instinct here is actually correct: this is, in fact, social engineering, but then, that would be the point of the various "Gender Studies" programs which have latched onto universities the nation over. Now let's see what Fisher says in response:

"She is telling us, with her tone, so much more than she realizes: that she feels comfortable with motherhood, that nurturing comes naturally to her, that she enjoys taking care of a baby, and the baby loves her with all his baby heart, because she is his mama. 

But all of her training tells her that these things add up to error.  She's been implanted with all sorts of false sensitivities, which tell her something is wrong -- even when everything is, by the standards and instinctive delights developed over the entire course of humanity, going just like it's supposed to go."

Yes. This, after unpacking a few "faulty assumptions" (and they are indeed faulty) such as "that a child's preference for one parent over the other, at any particular stage of development, is a sign that someone is the victim of sexism, rather than evidence that men and women are different -- and that kids need both." Again, the point of gender studies is not to study the feminine and the masculine and the celebrate their differences, nor to see how each one completes the other, but (as with so many other diversity-driven programs) to subvert, ignore, blend, destroy, or engineer and propagandize away those differences.

Yet, as Fisher notes well, this ends up being all an act, and the differences can be repressed and subverted, but they still hide under the surface for anyone who's willing to look. To use an alliterative statement of the sort employed by my co-blogger: that subversion ends in sadness.