ligament thickening

Hmm, makes sense, especially in early pregnancy, to keep the uterus forwards until it pops out the front.

Alemama, how did you find this out? What was the context of it?

I had no idea
truly fascinating.
how does that happen?
when do they 'thin back' to normal? or do they stay thickened?

So maybe being very small and thin is a risk for osteoporosis because the bones don't become bulky and heavy to carry a lot of weight around? Isn't being overweight just another way of doing weight bearing exercise? Whoa! The scientists won't like that one.

Just pop in to post this:

Skinny fat article

Here’s a perfect example of how the round ligaments have been historically discounted by the medical system. You can read in almost any gynecology textbook that the round ligaments have "no supportive value". This guy thinks they have no value at all.
click here

Hope he got my drift :)

It is interesting that he does say that the round ligaments hold the uterus forward, but he has already decided that they are useless, so he doesn't ask why the uterus needs to be held forward in the first place.

Twisted logic. I hope he is never chosen for jury duty.

alemama, your post reminded me of an example of idiocy I witnessed my first year in college. we were taking bio lab, about to dissect fetal pigs (there's idiocy right there, but not my point). the professor asked my lab partner if he knew whether our pig was male or female and the know-it-all says smugly 'female' (I knew it was male, we had just been debating between ourselves). lab prof. asks why he thinks its female and know it all says 'duh, she has nipples!' to which prof replied 'so do you!'
I love a good come-back. we all almost died laughing. knowitall ended up dropping the course. I hope he never made it to med school.

and as for male nipples, I saw a national geographic episode once of some african culture where the elderly grandfathers allow the babies to suckle while the mothers work in the fields.

DH likes to nurse the kids! I think he is totally crazy but of course kids love it! I still nurse my 2 yo ds (3.5 yo dd recently weaned herself), my 2 girls love to 'nurse' from dad's nipples. It is a good ol' joke in our house...

Liv

Sorry for ruining the ligament topic for you, Alemama... :)

I think this is cute! Like the DD who wanted to wee standing up. Many of us grew up in societies that did not allow for this kind of playful variation - fear and dread were the rule. What a good wife to laugh along! :)

Well, actually, male nipples are back up in case mom dies. They really CAN nurse! I'm not convinced that any part of our bodies is useless, and as with these ligaments, it's an unwise assumption for scientists to make. Our understanding of our bodies is so far from complete yet

LIv, I can understand your DH enjoying nursing the baby. Nursing feels really nice once baby gets his/her act together. I can see that the same pleasurable sensations would happen for men as for women.

I know a certain man who goes nuts having his nipples played with. And I am not saying any more about that!

Enjoying nursing as an erotic experience is one of those TMI subjects that gets associated with paedophilia, for all the wrong reasons.

I think it is no coincidence that we enjoy mating very much. Otherwise our species would never reproduce because we would not be motivated by pleasure to make babies. We would watch football or the telly instead. I think that is the same sort of pleasure that we get from nursing, or having our breasts played with as sexual pleasure. That is no coincidence either. If using our breasts for their primary use is not pleasurable, why would we bother nursing our babies? We could just give our babies and their bottles of formula to the people who were going to watch the football, and tell them all to go off and enjoy themselves.

Men, of course, know that if they can get up close and personal to a woman they might even be able to impersonate a baby and play with her boobies (which conjure up lovely memories from his babyhood) and mesmerises the woman. Once he makes her boobies feel really good she is putty in his hands. She might even mate with him and look after him as well.

Yes, it is all connected, in my opinion. It keeps us human. To deny those primitive urges and pleasures is to be less human. To embrace them and to use them wisely makes us more human.

Louise

really have no erotic feelings related to bf. the way my nurslings and my dh handle my boobs is completely different and feels completely different to me.
I bf to nourish my child, it gives me a deep satisfaction, and (early on anyway) I can feel a special kind of relaxation/calm wash over me as the baby feeds. I get sleepy and mellow. dh ellicits a very different reaction. I'm not saying there's anything 'dirty' or 'wrong' about bf and I'm not paranoid about pedophilia, but I doubt most women have erotic sensations related to bf.
seems that men tend to be attracted to babymaking-nourishing parts as part of nature's plan to ensure babymaking. makes more sense to me than assuming most men like to reenact their babyhood.

Hi Gmom

Fair call. I relate to nursing in a similar way to your description. That feeling of relaxation and calm is very special in a nursing Mum's day. I could never get enough of it. I believe it is caused by an increase in prolactin, the mothering hormone, which happens when the nipple is stimulated and the letdown reflex happens. No, it is not sexual but it is very much on the same branch of the tree. A bit like a long, caring massage. It is almost indescribable because I think it comes from the limbic system of the brain (lower level thinking, instinctive, gut feelings, automatic responses, reflexes, fight or flee, etc), so we have little control over it, just like hunger and fullness, sexual urge, sexual satisfaction, that nice feeling when you crawl into bed at night, that nice 'getting home feeling', the feeling I get from smelling my nearest and dearest. The desire to nurse babies is pretty fundamental, you would have to agree.

I don't think there is a direct relationship between sexual satisfaction and the satisfaction that I experienced nursing my babies, though I have heard that some women do experience nursing as an erotic experience, even to the point of orgasm,, which just demonstrates to me the degree of variation between humans.

However, many animals mimic another role in order to get their needs met with others of their species, eg the wolflike social behaviour of dogs, where an adult dog will use puppy behaviour to demonstrate their submission to another adult dog, in order to elicit caregiving behaviour, rather than enemy killing (or food hunting) behaviour, just for their own self-preservation. There is also an element of sexual play in sheep, where lambs learning to be social sheep, as young as three or four weeks, will hump each other, regardless of gender, despite sexual immaturity, but a ram will not mate a ewe until she is comfortable enough being close to him to allow him to mount her. (Not sayiing that the ram is pretending to be a lamb, but maybe he is, standing close to her). The ewe will stay close to him when he approaches but doesn't seem to be particularly excited by the whole mating process. He has to get her feeling good about him. Otherwise she and all the other 'on heat' ewes he gathers in his daily harem would just keep grazing, and all spread out again, and he could miss mating them. Mounting other rams is also a way that a flock of rams demonstrate their dominance over each other. It is much less damaging than the tendency they have to have butting fights like elk etc, or butting the submissive animals in the shoulder or knee with the aim of laming them, and keeping their ascendency in the flock.

This is where I think the mother-baby role can be played out by a man seeking to use his disguise quite unconsciously as a means of fulfilling the drive to mate and reproduce. It would engender in the woman that same relaxed calmness that would make her feel safe, and enable the male to feel safe. Remember the spiders and mantids that eat the male after mating. If the male comes to the female exhibiting submissive behaviour he is less likely to be damaged in the encounter.

This is all just my opinion. I think we have a lot of instinctive stuff happening in our dealings with other humans. There is a whole Body Language industry built on it.

Once again, I would opine that there is nothing inherently wrong with sexual feelings at any time. It is how tied up they are with care or dominance that we have experienced as children, and how they relate to our sense of worth, and how we respond to our own sexual feelings, that determines how well we relate to and care for each other.