OFF THE WIRE
Kimberly Seals Allers
I’m not really sure why breasts can be openly used to sell beer and entice you to eat chicken wings at Hooters, but when they are used in their actual context—feeding a baby—people get all Puritanical.
Oh, the hypocrisy!
This week another breastfeeding mom, who was covered up, was forced to stop feeding her four-month old in the hallway of Washington D.C., DMV office when two (GASP!) female security guards told her to stop because it was indecent.
Simone Dos Santos, a lawyer herself, was waiting for a traffic hearing and stepped out into the hallway to breastfeed when the guards approached her, though she was covering her baby with a jacket.
"I was shocked, upset and angry that by providing food for my son, I was being treated like a criminal," she said in recent news reports.
As an attorney dos Santos knew that legally she had rights -- 28 states as well as D.C. exempt breastfeeding from public indecency laws.
But it’s a shame that the laws of common sense don’t govern most people. And it is our rights as mothers and the health of our babies who ultimately suffer when women are made to feel uncomfortable when performing the biological norm for infant feeding.
Breastfeeding is what our bodies were made to do. And breast milk is the best preventative infant health we can give our babies. Feeding our young used to be as natural and instinctive as it is for any other animal, but somehow we’ve lost our instincts and our choices about our babies first food are more based on cultural norms than research or facts.
And the oversexualization of the breast hasn’t helped. Breasts are everywhere: on billboards, in magazines and spilling out of skin-tight attire. Bathing suits have grown skimpier by the year. I wonder if any of those female security guards have purchased those tiny bikini tops they are now marketing to 9-year-old girls? Women spend much money to make their breasts bigger, bouncier, rounder and or more perky, but everyone forgets this one indisputable truth: that they are merely mammary glands – fatty tissue with milk ducts designed to feed babies.
Wake up women! Society has told us that it is perfectly acceptable to show our breast on their terms—pushed up, dangling, with a beer, in a wet-T-shirt contest, or parading around a pole, but to show our breasts to feed our babies is indecent!!
I really can’t take it anymore.
Yes, I am a unapologetic first food advocate. I believe that every baby should have fair and equal access to the best infant nutrition possible. But women can’t make those decisions clearly, with this type of hypocrisy and hype crowding the issues. And that makes breastfeeding an issue for every woman.
If we can reclaim our breasts from the advertisers and marketers maybe then we can use them for our babies without being made to feel uncomfortable. Are you ready to get your breasts back?
Oh and the next time I see a man with boobs topless, I’m calling the police. Who's with me?
