Posted on 05/11/2012 11:54:39 AM PDT by servo1969
Jamie Lynn Grumet, the 26-year-old mother featured on the cover of Time magazine breastfeeding her 3-year-old son, has done more this week than become the poster woman for “attachment parenting,” the sometimes laudable movement that advises parents to be physically and emotionally available and responsive to their children. She has shown the limits of such a concept, and the ways in which it can be twisted into a bizarre, contemptible caricature of itself.
Grumet is a model, and models have to have at least healthy dose of narcissism (television journalists like me, too, by the way). But I fear Grumet has more than what’s healthy.
Because she thought nothing of becoming far more famous than she ever was or ever would have been by getting naked on the cover of Time using her son as a prop—letting him, in fact, look right into the camera and be completely recognizable while sucking her nipple. He may never be better-known for anything than for being a breastfeeding 3-year-old on the cover of a national magazine.
Ever.
When he enters school later in his young life he may be ridiculed for it. And these realities hint at a woman who could (and I have not evaluated her) have very poor boundaries and be willing or likely not only to nurture a child, but to absorb him, deny him his personhood and render him no more than her appendage.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
“It is only uncommon in western cultures that it has become an issue.”
Is this a bad thing? Lots of things are “only uncommon in western cultures”, and for the most part, I think that our culture is stronger because of these missing elements.
We live in a bizarro world that considers the human body to be obscene.
And Time Magazine is even sicker.
“My breasts wouldn’t mow the lawn but standing without a shirt in the yard they’d work having someone else to mow the lawn.”
LOL. Probably true. Men are simple.
“Breasts are for feeding the young, you have assigned an extra use.”
I’d argue that the Creator of breasts assigned this “extra use”, since they happen to function exactly as one would expect a secondary sexual characteristic to work on nearly 100% of the male heterosexual population. That can’t be explained away by writing if off as perversion.
“We live in a bizarro world that considers the human body to be obscene.”
Hey, if you want to go live with the barbarians running around dangling, nobody is stopping you. If you want to live with the civilized folks, put a fig leaf on it.
Don’t care how long anyone breastfeeds their kids
Do care about exploiting children for political agendas. It’s disgusting.
Maybe a fig leaf is big enough for you...
.....”this is ‘an act of media violence against a child’..., committed by adult journalists who also commandeered his will (as did his mother),... for sensation and profit..... Rarely do we get such evidence of how wrong parenting can go, how poorly journalists can behave and how slow we can be to recognize ugliness when it is disguised as something beautiful”.....
When there are no boundaries anything goes....the most which will occur is a somewhat public outcry....a few TV interviews with mama defending herself ($$$$$)...more photographs and videos ($$$), perhaps a book or something of that nature, ($$$). and then it’ll be history til the next bimbo goes after the dollar.......Meanwhile she’s made a mint and laughs all the way to the bank. End of story.
It's been observed, "There's no 'normal' life. There's just life."
Neither are "weirdos." They're just ways of life -- one in Western Civilization, the other in third-world places where freedom combined with a solid moral framework have yet to liberate their people to prosper. Here, it's disrespectful to peoples' dignity on a lot of fronts -- the kid in the photo, males in general because it probably puts them in the distasteful place of connecting childhood with sexual arrousal, and a large generation of women who were raised to be modest about nudity even in front of their own sex.
Necessity dictates the third world folks' approach; our own culture would be pretty nervous about seeing that Time Magazine cover replayed at, say, Disney World, or your kid's school play or graduation. A whole family in America bedding down in the same room year after year would raise hackles, and rightly -- what third world family with a lick of sense would prefer that?
Western civilization subscribes to modesty, because modesty protects privacy. Privacy respects dignity; where there is the prosperity to afford privacy, more respect is applied to dignity. But no matter where or why, the worst transgression that can be made against a fellow human, is to deprive him or her of dignity.
There are no weirdos here except for the exhibitionists.
The San people are easily startled. But they will be back, and in greater numbers.
Infantile American males are shouting, “My turn, my turn!”.
Personally, I think that sending kids to prison-preparatory institutions called “public schools” is far more barbaric than anything that goes on in the third world, among many other things.
True..but that being said the bodies we want to see naked we don't and the bodies we DON'T want to see naked we do.
A nudist colony comes to mind.
Excuse me. That is utter and complete garbage. Read contemporary literature of, say 100 years ago, or 220 years ago.
I bet that any child in the pioneer west who ran to his mom at the age of three and yanked down her shirt to nurse while she was busy working, and any mother who tolerated it, would not have lasted long.
In any but the most hungry of places, it can only be a power dynamic on the part of either or both both kid and parent. The kid certainly doesn't need to nurse physiologically at the age of three.
Or maybe it's a world that considers the human body to be worthy of respect to itself, and respectful of those other bodies around it.
I don't want to see your wife's titties.
AMEN!!!
The first thing I thought of was “they must have photoshopped another kid . . . no mother would set her own child up for ridicule like that.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.