Boobs

The breastfeeding wars rage on. The latest battle is over a recent cover of BabyTalk Magazine, a magazine that presumably talks a lot about babies and things babies are into, like being fed and stuff.

It seems some readers of this magazine — parents, presumably — got a little hot and bothered by this:

And BabyTalk received a heap of letters from disgruntled readers:

“I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine,” one person wrote. “I immediately turned the magazine face down,” wrote another. “Gross,” said a third.

…

Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies. Yet in a poll of more than 4,000 readers, a quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo — a baby and part of a woman’s breast, in profile — inappropriate.

OMGWTF!!!!!1!!!one*

Not a fleshy mound of socially constructed slutbagitude attached to something pure and holy and innocent on the cover of a magazine about sweet little know-nothing babies who haven’t yet been taught to simultaneously fetishize the breast as a sex object while scoffing at its importance as a source of nourishment for new life!! How could BabyTalk betray its readers’ good taste by depicting something so depraved as a human actually using a boob as something other than a receptacle for hastily delivered jiz?

One mother who didn’t like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it.

“I shredded it,” said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. “A breast is a breast — it’s a sexual thing. He didn’t need to see that.”

It’s the same reason that Ash, 41, who nursed all three of her children, is cautious about breast-feeding in public — a subject of enormous debate among women, which has even spawned a new term: “lactivists,” meaning those who advocate for a woman’s right to nurse wherever she needs to.

“I’m totally supportive of it — I just don’t like the flashing,” she says. “I don’t want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn’t want to see.”

I sure hope Parent of the Year Gayle Ash clawed out her son’s eyes when she nursed him. Because if she didn’t, she’s got a lot of explaining to do, seeing as how she’s so set on seeing breasts as completely sexualized. I mean, how did she square that in her mind when she shoved her boob in junior’s mouth for the first, second, and fiftieth times?

And, let’s face it, Gayle. Are you so sure you don’t want your husband and son to see a breast they didn’t want to see? Or are you just trying to control the boob intake of your bepenised housemates? Because, um, you should really get a frigging life if your time spent on Batshit Boob Patrol means that some exhausted nursing mother, carrying around a diaper bag and stroller and a fragile little mound of soul and some pretty heavy emotional weight, has to shuffle her way into a damp stinky restroom to feed her baby just so you don’t have to think about your dirty boys having naughty thoughts about boobies that aren’t yours.

Yeesh, lady. Yeesh!

And then Kelly Wheatley, bless her, wrote to applaud the cover “because, she says, it helps educate people that breasts are more than sex objects,” but she ends up just making me sad.

And yet Wheatley, 40, who’s still nursing her 3-year-old daughter, rarely breast-feeds in public, partly because it’s more comfortable in the car, and partly because her husband is uncomfortable with other men seeing her breast.

“Men are very visual,” says Wheatley, 40, of Amarillo, Texas. “When they see a woman’s breast, they see a breast — regardless of what it’s being used for.”

What is this “men are visual” crap I hear so much about? Like women see things in monochrome and infrared pixels, like dogs or Predator. People with eyes are very visual. And people with eyes who see a woman’s breast see a breast — regardless of what it’s being used for.

Some people, see, when confronted with something so natural and non-titillating (sorry, had to) as a woman breast-feeding her baby, are able to continue functioning like rational higher apes and not break down into fits about the supposed social consequences of such a tarty act.

People, I say this with as much love as I can muster, grow up.

*Yeah, I went there.