Between blotch and blok

Yet you are opposed to working within the constraints of normality - that babies have to eat, that the best food for them is breastmilk

So what's wrong with breast pumps? If the answer is 'everything', stop bitching about how vicitmised you are and invent one that more usefully mimics the action of a baby. (And don't you dare pretend you're stubborn and immature enough to say 'why not use a baby'. If you want me to take you seriously as a set of opinions, you can damn well debate in a sensible manner). What's wrong with acknowledging that once you've made the choice to be a mother in this society, your life is going to change in big and important ways, and one of those ways might be that you don't get to go wherever you please whenever you please and do whatever you feel like while you're there? What is wrong with accepting that life as a mother will not be the same as life as an independent adult? Where's the refusal to live within constraints? In my understanding that motherhood in this society imposes constraints or your refusal to deal with the fact they exist?

Frankly I think Western women are far too close to actually swallowing the quite ridiculous belief that we can have the lifestyle of an independent adult as well as the pleasures of motherhood. It's nothing but egotism: I want to be able to go where I want and do what I want, so everyone else is obviously just wrong and out to get me. Making us reject the reality of our own femininity like this is the crowning achievement of a society which tries to turn us all into egotists: a nation of self-important idiots who believe that we should want everything, right this minute, and who refuse like so many million temperamental two-year-olds to believe for a second that there are some things we just do not get to do. And before you accuse me of being a 1950s Tory out to return women to subservience, think for just a minute about the fact that in "less advanced" cultures, after birth women are traditionally given a period of 'lying in' for up to forty days after the birth; where did that go for us? We threw it away our own damn selves, that's where - Western mothers are too busy going back to aerobics and pilates, going out to posh restaurants for Lunch With Friends, anticipating getting back to their careers, desperate to climb back on the endless treadmill of illusory status and achievement. We expect to have it all, the kids and the lifestyle, and we whine like adolescents when that turns out to make life difficult. No, it's not funny to realise that if you choose to be a mother in this culture you're putting yourself in an impossible situation because you can't be what the West describes as a woman at the same time: but understanding that doesn't mean it's going to change tomorrow, and just because you're in an unpleasant situation now doesn't mean you have the right to behave like a complete idiot about it.

I'm getting very sick of a discussion with someone who would rather accuse me of deviance than open-mindedly examine my point of view, but I'm going to say for one last time that changes in attitudes like this happen slowly and over time, not as the direct result of militancy and conflict. Go and read up on the development of law relating to sex, obscenity, abortion and so forth over the last 150 years - the gradual alteration of State's general right to intervene in private morality for the greater good of society. I recommend 'The Rules of Desire' by Cate Haste. Think about what you read, and get a bit of a feel for exactly how much resistance there is to social change when the subject is one of the most basic and emotive of life's issues. And then take another look at your own behaviour, and ask yourself whether you really are using your energy in the right way for the situation as it stands now.