OK, on my way to work I just saw something disturbing. A group of very young women in bikinis stood alongside the highway waving at cars. Not since I left Ukraine have I witnessed a scene like that.

And then I noticed they were holding promotional signs for the new car wash that opened nearby.

I’m old, so my first thought was, “I hope they are using a lot of sunscreen.”

My second thought was, “The poor kids are breathing in exhaust fumes all day long.”

My third thought was, “I can’t believe there are people who want to recreate the idiotic car wash commercials that feature half-naked women in real life.”

My fourth thought was that I needed to blog about it so I did.

Our discussion about the “discriminated” male WASPS continues. One colleague stated that

Research shows that Whites, as a group, do feel discriminated against

which is something that started in the 1980s.

Is that true? Because that sounds very insane. I mean, who would be discriminating against them? Other white people? Racial minorities?

We have a Sam’s Club opening in our town next week, and there are little tables with people selling membership everywhere. Yesterday at the hospital I discovered such a table in the midst of the cafeteria. I thought this was obnoxious because hospitals are supposed to be about something other than peddling extraneous services, but I was the only Grinch who didn’t love the tables and the advertisement.

People would enter the cafeteria and practically whelp with joy when they saw the promotional table. They greeted the promoters like they were B-list movie stars.

I’m not being in any way judgmental of them because I know that most of the town didn’t even exit 10 years ago. There was wilderness where today we have Walmart, Best Buy, Office Depot, etc. People needed long drives to get anywhere where they could eat or shop. And then the university began to expand and the area started building up. For people who have spent their entire lives in the area, this is a pretty major development. Of course, it would be better if individuals and families started their own businesses here instead but it never happened. Only enormous chains have the resources to develop this kind of land. As a result, our Walmart is growing like a huge, ugly mushroom after the rain and transforming into Walmart SuperCenter.

Among all of the saccharine and useless articles on breastfeeding, it is next to impossible to find a rare gem that makes a useful point. Reader Evelina Anville, however, managed to alight on just such an elusive piece on the subject. Here is the important point that Karla A. Erickson, the article’s author, is making:

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.

The burdens of breastfeeding are real and considerable including the restraints to women’s spatial mobility and time. But the other part no one every talks about is that breastfeeding also consolidates pre-existing biological tendencies that privilege the breastfeeding parent.

Breastfeeding does, indeed, function in a way that pushes the father away from the child and creates a barrier between them that it becomes very hard to break afterwards. Many women are more than happy to let this happen for the following reasons:

Breastfeeding is a burden, but it’s also a power trip. Breastfeeding sets up the breastfeeder as the expert, the authority and the primary parent in the life of the breastfed baby.

Women who are used to feeling less important, less competent, less intelligent, and less valuable than their husbands appreciate having one area in which they have supreme authority and can feel that nothing worthwhile will happen without their contribution and expertise.

Imagine a woman who has subsumed her entire identity in a relationship with a man. She has no money or profession of her own and has even abandoned her own name to mark herself as the man’s appendage. If she suddenly finds herself in possession of a skill that makes her more important than said man, she will hold on to the skill for as long and as hard as she can. This is what brings into existence all of those breastfeeding pride movements and attempts to prolong breastfeeding until a child is way too old to be sucking on Mommy’s body parts.

Of course, women who don’t need to prove their worth as human beings in such Byzantine ways can look for ways of letting fathers become as central in the children’s lives as mothers are:

I teach a college course on Gender and Society. One year I invited three dads to come and talk about parenting. The college students adored the hour and a half session. It was such a rare treat to hear dads talking about being dads. One of the fathers 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.

This is a brilliant article by a brilliant person and I encourage everybody to read it in full.

Thank you, Evelina Anville, for sharing it!