Gluttonous Baby!

August 7, 2009 at 7:44 am | Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

A friend just sent me this link, to an article on a breastfeeding doll, from, well, from Fox news.

Rather than having the ubiquitous bottle , this doll is designed to be ‘breastfed’. And of course, being Fox, the first parental response that they give is, ‘that’s not cool’.

Obviously, in Ireland, little girls feeding their dolls bottles is as natural a sight as rain in the summertime.

But I’ve been reading a lot of comments in magazines like Mothering, that suggest it’s perhaps not as much of a no brainer as we think. Those breastfeeding enthusiasts would rather have their children feed their  dolls the same way the children themselves were fed, and the magazine frequently publishes very cute pictures of toddlers (both little mommies and daddies!)with their baby doll, or elephant, in a mini sling, breastfeeding.

In a culture where bottle feeding is the norm, as I’ve said above, it makes sense for children to emulate the way they were fed one way or other – but for the parents who are throwing away the dolly-bottles, they’re rejecting the subliminal conditioning. 

The real issue, fo me here, is the idea that it is ‘not cool’ for a child to mock-breastfeed their doll. That it’s somehow improper. Why would we see it that way? Is there something sexual about a three year old holding a doll to their tiny, barely there nipple, and pretending to feed it? What are people afraid of in this scenario? To me, this paranoia comes down to yet more sexualisation of the breast, and in this case, small children.

It’s cool to give them make up, bikini tops on their flat little chests, high heels, Disney-fy them, feed them Britney and Bratz dolls and Hannah Montana from an early age, turn them into teeny pinups. As long as they don’t pretend they’re feeding a doll with their own milk, from their non-existent breasts? To me, this is an extreme inversion of values. And a somewhat twisted view of what human sexuality is and isn’t.

I think the biggest issue here is that they’ve called the doll ‘Gluttonous Baby’ – that seems a bit unfair to the babies!