“Proper Swimwear” for a Toddler Girl Includes a Top?!

(This article was originally published at Good Vibrations Magazine.)

"Proper" (girly!) swimwear

At the city pool on a steamy Sunday, we were recently told by the lifeguards that our daughter, who just turned three, needs to wear a top and not just a bottom. Isn’t that taking the sexualizing of young girls to the extreme?

Really, what is going on when the nipples of a girl’s undeveloped breasts are asked to be covered? Is the case as bestselling author of three parenting books Liz Fraser poses that “the public’s media-fueled terror of pedophilia is now so strong that many parents don’t want their children to be seen naked by strangers ‘just in case’ they are photographed and put onto the internet, or peered at by sexual predators”?

A naked child has become, for many, a potential sex abuse incident, rather than the beautiful, pure thing it is, despite the reality, which is that — mercifully — abuse by pedophiles is far less prevalent than the furore that surrounds them would imply.

Continues Fraser:

Most damaging in all of this is the bizarre paradox that this whispering, blushing shunning of nakedness comes hand in hand with our culture’s obsession with sex and sexuality.

Women's Breasts Are Not Just or Always Sexual!

The Village Voice

In Canada, women are celebrating the 15th anniversary of their right to walk around topless in public. Next year, women in New York can also celebrate the 20th anniversary of their right to walk around topless in public based on the right not to be discriminated against based on their sex.

“Breasts like the entirety of women’s bodies may not always be sexual,” explains SlutWalk co-founder Heather Jarvis to the Toronto Sun.

Amazingly, they are in fact also capable of turning into enduring feeding machines. But with our culture's sexualizing of women's bodies and breasts (that even affects girls as young as toddlers who're asked to wear tops at the pool), many breastfeeding women still feel the need to hide beneath nursing tents. Though every state in the US but three (Nebraska, West Virginia and Idaho) have laws protecting the rights of breastfeeding women.

When He Wishes to Cuddle but She Wants a Quicky

The Telegraph: Men want cuddles ...

"An international survey of couples for the Kinsey Institute suggests that it's men who thrive on non-sexual physical intimacy, while women are remarkably unfussed about being cuddled," reported the Guardian earlier this week. Continued the article:

We certainly don't seem to be very good at valuing sex as a part of relationships. Over the weekend, I was surprised to read a moving confession from a man describing himself as "the rejected husband," who describes the misery and rejection of being in a relationship where sex has died. "I ache for you," he writes. "Not for sex, but for sex with you."

What the article didn't make clear, was that this specifically rejected husband is a father of three whose wife will only "reciprocate the physical contact," as he explains, "on a Saturday, long after our last child is asleep." He concedes that they have "long working days made more frenetic by three energetic kids." -- Yet he complains:

I'm tired of you being tired all the time. Do you have to go to the gym quite so often? Must you devote so much energy to the PTA?

Perhaps this rejected husband should drop the cuddly foot strokes and suggest a quicky to his wife. Perhaps the idea of "sex with you" sounds like too big of a production to her; something to be left for an occasional Saturday night.

A Mother's Sexuality: Taking Back MILF | BlogHer {featured read}

I've entertained the discussion of women as Marilyns or Jackies, generalizing to describe problems of misaligned expectations between partners, but it wasn't until I finished reading America's Queen, Jackie Kennedy Onassis' biography by Sarah Bradford, that I realized how wrong these assumptions are, and how damaging they are to women who fall into Marilyn versus Jackie discussions.

... My point is that these two women against which so many of us have measured ourselves are not points on a spectrum between virgin and whore, good and naughty, mother and home-wrecker (Marilyn may have slept with JFK, but Jackie became close to Aristotle Onassis during her sister's affair with him and never stopped competing for his attention with his lover of nine years, the soprano Maria Callas). No, these women aren't points on a two dimensional plane, they're complete beings, with their own motives, drives, goals and stories. Just like every one of us.
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