BREASTFEEDING BABY DOLL -- WARNING: I TALK ABOUT BOOBS

How in the world did I manage to miss this when it was released in the U.S. on April 6th?!!?

Apparently, it has stirred up quite the controversy, with the most ridiculous argument being that it sexualizes young girls. Seriously?!? Sex? That's where you go with that?

Clearly, that's been the primary issue with women breastfeeding in public all along.  It makes people uncomfortable because they immediately view breasts as sexual.  And not to insinuate that they aren't, but let me just assure you, for the record, that at the moment you're breastfeeding a baby, let alone two at the same time, it's anything but sexually stimulating.

In fact, early on, it's pretty fucking painful.  There's biting and blood and cracked nipples and flaking skin.  And in between feedings, when you should be resting and recovering, you're busily pumping your overly engorged, rockhard milkbags with a sadistic electronic sucking machine just to help keep up your supply, or to store it while you're at work, or to donate it to needy milk banks.

That being said, once your body acclimates, it's a pretty phenomenal experience.  That you can sustain a life with your body is an incomparable power.  And, truly, breastfeeding is possibly one of the greatest moments you'll ever share with a child, if you're lucky enough to do so.  I don't regret a single second of the 2 years I was fortunate enough to do it.  And for every year since, the cry of a newborn, any newborn, still sends tingles right through my breasts.

But as much as I'd like to support this new marketing ploy under their whole "play and learn" scheme, I have two melon-sized complaints about this:

1) Why is the baby pretending to suckle on a flower?  

Didn't we already go through this social discussion a few years ago, about how it's not healthy to give pet names to children's private parts and that they should just be referred to by their proper biological terms? (And yes, that's coming from the hypocrite who's daughter has a "gigi" and who's son has a "jalapeño and a couple of vidalias".)

And yet here we've got a little flower on a bra. And not a fake nipple in sight. What's wrong with nipples, for crissakes??? We'll give Barbie 56 DDD breasts, but we shy away from a nub?  Even though every single one of us has seen piglets and kittens and puppies and calves suckle from teats.  And most of us HAVE actually seen a baby suckle from an actual woman's...gasp!...actual breast.

Really?? What is it that we're so afraid of here? That we're encouraging our children to pretend play? That our little girls are gonna wanna have babies earlier?  That we're damaging a child's psyche by exposing them to the magnificence of mother nature's self-sustaining concession stand?  That more little girls are gonna wanna be stay-at-home mommies than Board Room Bitches? PLEASE! We can be and do and become whatever we want,  regardless of how we're socialized, or I'd be married to Ken and living in a three-story townhouse with a pulley elevator and baking homemade brownies all day long in my easy-bake oven!

So, does that mean, then, that we should also get rid of GI Joes and the buckets of army guys and the fake guns and rockets because they encourage our children to perform adult actions without fully understanding the genesis or consequences of said actions???  I mean, just the sight of phallic instruments that seek to destroy human life certainly makes ME uncomfortable...

But no. No, of course not.

Because children learn by mimicking behavior.  Any and all behavior.  Bad and good.  Healthy and eh, not-so-much.  And that in combination with their life lessons, and family values, and friends' influences, and teachers' guidance, and free market advertising (forfuck'ssake) somehow produces the best possible iteration of ourselves.  If we're lucky.

Okay, enough, onto complaint #2) The sucking baby doll is almost NINETY DOLLARS?!?!?

Why the hell would anyone spend $89 dollars on a toy just because it puckers and purses its lips, when what we're supposedly trying to encourage here is PRETEND play and children using their IMAGINATIONS?!?

Betsy Wetsy's functionality was WAY more impressive, and actually, you know *produced* something.

But this, this is just ridiculousness.
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