At a casual dinner a few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were part of a large group of mixed persons. One of the women at our table was a new mother, and during the appetizers, she offered her baby his own snack by unbuttoning her blouse and beginning to breastfeed. My boyfriend, who was sitting beside me, immediately reddened and looked away. Then he looked back. I saw that most of the men at the table were following his lead. Except for one rather dubious fellow who wanted only to catch a glimpse of a partially bared woman, the rest of the men were looking out of politeness. They focused hard on the mother’s face and refused to avert their eyes so that no one would think anyone was uncomfortable with anything.
They were exceedingly uncomfortable, of course. The women of our dinner party had mixed reactions. Some were mimicking the men, staring so hard at the poor mother that she must have felt we’d spotlighted her. The rest of the table, the other women and one man who was not only a hippy but also a father, went on doing what they were doing, which was mostly talking to each other and eating. After a few minutes, the mother put the breast away and people went back to ignoring her and the fact that she, with a new baby now swaddled on her lap, even had a breast, which is what most of them had wanted to do in the first place.
Our culture is not one that is very comfortable with the “spectacle” of breastfeeding. While we have entire restaurants dedicated to displaying certain parts of the female anatomy, and lingerie commercials air without shame on network TV, it is a rare sight indeed to see a woman breastfeeding on television. In fact, we haven’t heard much about breastfeeding in general until twenty-seven-year-old Emily Gillette of Santa Fe brought her breasts to the public dinner table. On October 13, 2006, Ms. Gillette was ordered to leave a Freedom Airline’s plane because she refused to cover up while breastfeeding her then one-year-old daughter. This incident sparked the emergence of support from existing “lactivist” groups, some even hosting “nurse-in” protests at local airports.
The last breast to receive so much media attention was Janet Jackson’s, and while the comparison may seem a shallow one, it begs an important distinction: the sexualized vs. the working breast. For most of America, the debate over the sexualized breast (i.e. the breast of beer commercials, Howard Stern shows, and even the most classily dressed celebrities) is a mostly moral one. But when it comes to the milk-producing mammaries, we just don’t know how to react.
We are, however, quite comfortable categorizing the breast as sexual. More and more women are choosing to increase the size of their breasts for aesthetic purposes. We even have television shows (think Dr. 90210), chronicling this transformation. An article in USA Today cites a statistic from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons stating that the number of women who had breast implants jumped 37 percent from 2000 to 2005.
But if we’re talking about the breast as a sex symbol, how does that influence our perception of a woman publicly breastfeeding? The process is not one that is even familiarized to children. Think of all the baby dolls out there with bottles full of magical milk. Like the inner-city children who are asked where a carton of milk comes from and answer the store, most children don’t ever connect dolly’s dinner with a breast. A disconnect has occurred between a baby’s sustenance and the female breast. When females expose their breasts in our country, they are, almost always, immediately sexualized. Women in America tend to wean their babies at a far earlier age than the rest of the world, and this cultural stigma is often posited as part of the reason.
