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.
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