Breastfeeding on The Simpsons

[lumberjane]

Did anyone else see this sequence on The Simpsons where Marge encounters a weirdly hostile breastfeeding group? I wonder what exactly the writers of The Simpsons think they're satirising here. Why on earth does Marge use the phrase 'nipple nazis'? Clearly the child who speaks to say formula feeding is wrong is meant to be a gag about extended bfing being 'wrong'. I found the whole thing really troubling.

Um, I'm quite committed to breastfeeding but I think it's just a comedy and I wouldn't read too much into it personally.
Perhaps it's more about how it can be hard to say you're doing something different to what everyone else is doing. For example, in our antenatal class it seemed like everyone was doing loads of swimming/baby massage classes and I felt that for a small baby an outing to Tesco was just as entertaining and the classes were a waste of money. I wouldn't ever have said that to them though.

PS If you were going to read more into it, I think it would be important to ask what the demographics/prevalence of breastfeeding are like in the USA? For all I know they could be quite different to the UK which could affect what the writers were getting at.

They joke about everyone ... Mayor Quimby and Ned for example are different ends of the lifestyle spectrum but get equally mocked. The fact they eat junk food and so forth is part of their "imperfect" family image, if Marge breastfed or Maggie spoke early it wouldn't work for the jokes.

My favourite parenting joke is when Rayne Wolf castle carries Homer in a ssc he had built for Danny De Vito. I'm a baby wearer.