Kakar wrote:
Ambrya wrote:
[quote]Isn't this objection to the sight of a breast bared for completely unsexual reasons a bit of a puritanical holdover when you get down to it? And isn't it possible that those women you accuse of "making a statement" are maybe just being a little more logical about it than you?
Perhaps. And no.
As I said in my post that didn't get posted (which I realize you most likely didn't see, obviously Pikko must have) I don't personally have a problem with it in most situations. The only time it really bothers me is when a woman goes out of her way to do it in a very public place, and makes no attempt at being subtle about it. The example I used was a food court in a shopping mall. There's people flat out everywhere and when a woman sits down and makes little or no effort at being discreet then I do take issue with it. Now if she goes and finds a more quiet place and uses a blanket and whatnot to cover up then fine, a baby's got to eat when it's hungry.
Like I said, on some level I agree with you--I would find the sight of a woman just popping 'em out with no effort at discretion in a place like the mall to be jolting as well. But (hopefully) as a person who is going to be a nursing mother in the not-so-distant future, and as a future midwife--a practice which places a very high emphasis on completely natural processes--I really feel the need to challenge why
we find this so objectionable, and why we can't divorce the sight of breasts in an erogenous context (eg. the gentlemen's club) from breasts used in a context that renders them no more erogenous than a cow's udder.
The mall is a tricky situation. On one hand, most of your medium-to-higher-end department stores have lounges adjacent to or as part of the restrooms, with sofas or padded benches which are really a reasonably comfortable place to duck away and nurse, if you're inclined to duck away. On the other hand, these lounges ARE adjacent to the restrooms, and what are we saying that we include the most "appropriate" place to nurse side-by-side with the bacteria-ridden and smelly place we go to eliminate our bodily wastes? If not deliberate, isn't there at least a subliminal undertone of "it's dirty" going on there? Again, I come back to the quote I once overheard from a (discreetly covered-up) nursing mother in a restaurant who was asked by a waitperson to take her operation into the restroom, which was "My son will eat his dinner in the bathroom right after you eat yours there." So, if a woman objects to the stigma attached to providing nursing facilities in the bathroom, those lounges aren't really an option.
Why the food court then? Not being the woman in question, and not knowing the layout of your particular mall, of course, I really can't answer that, I'm just speculating. Maybe she had agreed to meet someone in the food court and couldn't get in contact with them to let them know she wouldn't be there at the appointed time. Maybe she was hungry and wanted to get something to eat herself either before or after she finished nursing. Maybe somehow in her mind, it seemed more appropriate to do it in the food court than on one of those benches or sitting areas they tend to scatter throughout the corridors of the mall where you have people walking by on either side because you tend to be right smack in the middle of the corridor. Maybe having a table available worked better for the logistics of her operation than sitting on a bench somewhere would have.
Why not make an effort to cover up? Again, I can't say with any certainty. Maybe she forgot to bring her receiving blanket she might have otherwise used to drape over the exposed area. Or maybe she finds it inconvenient to have to fumble around beneath a drape to accomplish the operation. Maybe she's afraid of having a drape over her baby's face, for fear of suffocating it. Or maybe the baby objects to having a drape over his/her face and won't nurse if she uses one.
All of these are hypothetical, of course, but my point is that there are a lot of reasons she might have made the choice she made that have nothing to do with "flaunting" it, and that even the assumption that she was "flaunting" it is part and parcel of this stigma we attach to the honest sight of a naked breast. I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate, but at this particular stage in my life, for some reason I really feel obliged to challenge some of these objections we have to women's bodies and anything having to do with the natural processes surrounding having and caring for a baby.