Breastfeeding in Public and the Question of Sexism

Is one a prude, if one objects to full-view breastfeeding in public as opposed to discreet-breastfeeding in public?  With full-view breastfeeding, a woman simply pulls out her breasts and begins to breastfeed the child in her arms.  With discreet breastfeeding, a woman uses a towel to cover that breast that she pulls out in order to breastfeed the child in her arms. 

The State of Rhode Island has just made full-view breastfeeding of an infant in public legal wherever it is now legal for a woman to bottle-feed an infant in public.  So if a woman is sitting on the front row in a church or a mosque or a synagogue and the clergy person is male, said woman is now legally entitled to start full-view breastfeeding her child right before the male clergy, since there is no question but that she could bottle-feed the child while sitting in the front row.

The irony here is that the very legal act that is intended to give breastfeeding the very same standing as bottle-feeding does so only by ignoring the simple reality that there is a fundamental difference between breasts and baby-bottles. 

Unequivocally, breasts are also sex objects; and this is a fact that does not change simply in virtue of the reality that a woman is breast-feeding. 

Of course, any decent man (not married to the woman) will look the other way should a woman pull out her breast in order to feed her child.  And that, interestingly, enough is just the point.  A decent man would look the other way precisely because he would want to avoid the schizophrenia of the situation, namely that of admiring the woman’s breast while she is in the midst of engaging in a motherly function.  The woman’s husband, on the other hand, might very well admire her breast while she is breastfeeding.  And there is a very straightforward way in which his doing so can be just right.  That is the woman whose breasts he caressed and fondled as she and he were engaged in the very act of love-making that gave rise to the very child that she is presently nursing. 

Breasts will never be baby-bottles and baby-bottles will never be breasts.  Whatever equality is about, it cannot be about ignoring this simple truth.  And it will be noticed, by the way, that in the preceding paragraph I said that a decent man would look away.  It is just plain silly to suppose that only a man steep in sexism would need to look away. 

What is very puzzling, alas, is the following obvious question: Why the push for full-view breastfeeding, wherever bottle-feeding is legal, when surely discreet-breastfeeding would have more than sufficed for the purpose in question, namely that of feeding the infant?  In order to realize discreet-breastfeeding, very little is needed.  In a public setting, it would take only a second to come up with something creative, should a woman not have a towel with her.  Thus, we are not talking about a requirement that would constitute some burden.

One thing is very clear, from the fact that something is perfectly natural, what does not follow at all is that discretion is out of order.  When a man sees a woman whom he finds very attractive sexually a spontaneous erection is as natural as anything can be.  Yet, there can be any number of occasions when, rightly so, a man absolutely does not want his ever so natural erection to be noticed. 

The mistake of the new Rhode Island law is the mindset that taking seriously differences between women and men is automatically sexist.  Suppose a male clergy person is subject to spontaneous arousals whenever he is in the presence of women.  Well, it is very clear that such a male would do well to briefs rather boxer shorts during services, for instance.  Since women do not have prominent erections when they are sexually aroused, there is no need for attire that keeps such a thing from being noticed.  So there are times when men have to take precautions but women do not. 

Discreet breastfeeding is a simple way to perform an ever so important act for a child whilst diffusing the issue of sexual attraction that men characteristically and naturally have for female breasts.  Whatever the law might be, surely this is the decent thing for any woman to do. 

As we know, breastfeeding is a perfectly natural act.  So is sex, urinating, and defecating.  What we also know, given just the preceding examples, is that there are many ways to do what is natural and some of those ways are most inappropriate.

No woman should be prevented from breastfeeding in public.  Discreet breastfeeding roundly satisfies this objective without placing a burden upon women and also without ignoring the simple reality that for any psychology healthy straight man naked breasts are wonderful things to behold.  The asymmetry here has nothing to do with sexism but simply with the biological reality. 

There is no point in asking the hypothetical question: But what if discreet breastfeeding were not possible for humans?  For we would have to be very different indeed in order for it to be the case that discreet breastfeeding were not a possibility; and no one knows what other changes would also come about. 

Finally, it is mistake to point to the fact that our concern with full-view breastfeeding is just so much nonsense, since there are no doubt cultures where this is done.  Well, I suspect that those cultures are also quite different in lots and lots of other ways.  In particular, I suspect that the quotidian life of such cultures is not nearly as sexualized as Western culture is.  And that is no trivial difference. 

In a culture that sexualizes everything from eating cereal to using to buying a car to using a cell phone, surely there is context for sexual modesty.  And if breastfeeding one’s child is not such a context, then nothing can be.