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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jpmac who wrote (54212)	9/2/1999 9:38:00 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

how about- "Men raised by women who don't fight fair kill"

To: jpmac who wrote (54212)	9/2/1999 9:44:00 PM
From: E	Respond to of 108807

I am SO far behind on this thread. Jp, I'm posting this to you because you're the last one. Nursing revisited, in response to a PM. It got too long for a PM! Here is an assemblage of thoughts about what is appropriate behavior for one who thinks that it is, as a general rule, right and good to be considerate of the feelings of others. The particular "feeling" I'm addressing might be called "offendedness." Or "offense," I guess. Interests often conflict. In the case of nursing, for example, it is (partly) a question of balancing the advantages to a mother and perhaps to her baby of nursing the baby in, say, a restaurant, against the amount of offense that is likely to be taken if she does. I mention advantages to the baby because I suspect that women who use the pump with any frequency at all put their babies on cow's milk sooner than women who simply put the baby to the breast. What offends changes over time, as mores change. Mores often change because of the effective insistence of a particular affected group. There are undoubtedly societal changes that have taken place over the last two or three generations that we all agree are positive. Others are less unanimously approved. The mores objected to are not the same for each of us on Feelings. During the transition period from one custom to another, the total "quantity" of offendedness will be steadily dropping. That's the nature of the transition. For many, many customs, however, there will remain, for generations, some degree of offense taken by some persons. I talked about balancing advantages against amount-of-offendedness. The equation isn't that simple, of course. Psychological and ethical considerations enter the picture. For example, it is possible for a person to feel insulted, and demeaned, by the defining of some behavior of theirs they feel is their absolute right to engage in as "offensive." Manifesting "offendedness," in its getting-all-huffy mode, can, after all, be used in an attempt to force others to comply with one's own preferred life-ways. (I just can't say "life style" for the life of me.) In my next post, I'm going to list a number of acts that have rather recently been considered offensive by many people in our culture. Some of them still are. The point of the list is to propose that each of us will differ on which of these offending acts should cause the offending parties to change the behavior to be considerate, and which of them they should continue engaging in on any of several grounds-- that it is their right; that it is an insult to them that the behavior is made an issue of; that the cost to them in inconvenience, or dignity, or pleasure is too great to be sacrificed so as not to discomfit an unknown number of other persons. More...

To: jpmac who wrote (54212)	9/2/1999 9:49:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 108807

Continuation of that other nursing post.... Some philosopher, maybe Bertrand Russell, said (I've quoted it before) that the beginning of wisdom is getting things in their right category. I think if each of us divided the list below into (only) two categories, according to which acts, in our view, were acts that should not be engaged in because they might offend someone, and which were acts that are our right to engage in unapologetically, it would be interesting to see into which category each of us put nursing a baby. I suspect that those who propose the use of a breast pump or hiding would put nursing your baby in the same category in which they put picking your nose or taking your boom box to the top of a mountain or talking loudly in a waiting room. "Inconsiderate," they think. I suspect the nursing-libertarians would put nursing in the category of interracial dating or wearing a sexy dress or eating meat publicly. "How dare anyone make me feel uncomfortable about this?" For the fun of it, here's the list of offending, or not-long-ago offending, acts. dating or marrying interracially wearing a wonderbra and a very decollete dress in an upscale restaurant being eight months pregnant yet remaining in the work place going to a restaurant although you must dine sitting in your wheelchair wearing pants even though you are a woman holding hands in the mall holding hands in the mall; you are gay picking your nose in public nursing your baby in a restaurant; you are stripped to the waist nursing your baby in a restaurant; you are discreetly arranged talking loudly in a waiting room or restaurant so that others must listen to your conversation taking your boom box to a public park for a family picnic taking your boom box to a mountain top from which there is a magnificent view, a site used by others for quiet contemplation smoking in a restaurant smoking at all; you are a woman eating meat publicly; it is probable that some of your fellow diners are ethical- (as opposed to health-) vegetarians when God is mentioned, saying that you don't believe there is one