Breasts are pretty good multi-taskers. Biologically, they have a couple of very important purposes: nourishing offspring, and encouraging the male of the species to come help create said offspring in the first place. Culturally, they have a multitude of meanings. They’re some of the hardest working symbols around. I’m quite fond of mine.
I wish that our generic attitude towards breasts was just that, actually: fondness. Instead it is fraught and controversial. The Facebook breastfeeding ban has simply brought that to the fore and perhaps at least one positive has come out of the madness – people everywhere seem to be talking about breasts and their milk-making powers.
Facebook has been taking a lot of hits for the absurd hypocrisy in the way its policies are enforced. On the one hand, we have the perfectly natural photographs of mothers lovingly feeding their babies and children being removed. On the other hand, we have the terribly unnatural photographs of teenage girls posing seductively for the camera multiplying unabated every day. But… hold on a second – how unnatural are those other photos, really?
Distasteful, worrying, annoying, titillating, misogynistic, misguided, sexy, pornographic, hilarious, pathetic they may be. But unnatural? Notwithstanding silicone and photoshop, breasts-as-erotic doesn’t seem very unnatural to me. At least, it’s nothing new.
In arguing that breastfeeding photos are ‘natural’ and nothing to do with sex or even exhibitionism (aren’t social networking sites temples to exhibitionism?), those against the Facebook ban hope to dispute the ‘obscenity’ label. And yes, Facebook seems to be pretty slow to wake up the fact that breastfeeding is NOT obscene! Of course it isn’t. The notion is ludricous. A lot of people are saying things like breasts were made for feeding babies, men just don’t like their fantasies being disrupted by nature, breasts aren’t sex objects, they’re food. A lot of people have the best of intentions.
But what if they are unwittingly making things worse for women? What’s wrong with a breast being sexual as well as nurturing? Because it would require a woman to be multidimensional? We’d have to see lactation and sex as something other than polar opposites. Not a Madonna/Whore situation, but a reality situation. It would also require us to have the maturity to live with a little ambivalence.
The fact is, some men (and women) WILL find a glimpse of naked breast arousing, whether there is a baby around or not. Some women DO find the sensual experience of breastfeeding arousing (alas, I can’t claim to be one of them). Some people pay good money for lactation porn. Judging by some of the comments from online strangers that participants of the virtual nurse-in have received, there are a lot of people out there who are more than happy to have a bit of milk with their mammaries.
Not that I’m condoning turning a breastfeed into a perving session – quite the opposite. I’m just saying that putting a baby in a photograph doesn’t make a breast - or its owner – into an asexual earth mother, any more than photographing them doesn’t instantly make a thirteen-year-old’s breasts pornographic (yes, even in an art gallery, Kevin Rudd.)
What I am asking for is that I am not essentialised into oblivion. I am not a human milkbar. Nor am I a human amusement park, cleavage at the man-pleasing ready. I am a complex, sentient human being who happens to have breasts. Lactating breasts. Whether I choose to post photographs of them on Facebook or anywhere is not the business of salivating man-children any more than it is pathetic little lactophobes writing site usage policies in California.
Which is exactly why we need more images of breastfeeding in the media and online, not fewer. The more breastfeeding is seen as a normal part of everyday life for many women, the more it will cease to be a freakshow and become - dare I say it – natural – in the eyes of those doing the looking. So thanks is due to those women who participated in the M.I.L.C virtual nurse-in, and those who breastfeed in public every day. And the men who support them. Naturally.
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Edited to add some pertinent linkage
- A page with some of the ‘offending’ photos. Some of them do show a lot of naked flesh. Many of them don’t at all. Personally I find none of them offensive. How about you?
- This great post by PhD in Parenting is well worth a look, as is her more recent update.
- This is in my blogroll as well, but in case you’ve not clicked Jennifer James’ excellent collection of images reminds us that our uneasiness with breastfeeding is new (and largely due to the normalising of infant formula.) Look how far we’ve come.
7 Comments
January 6, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Well said!
January 7, 2009 at 10:55 pm
In the wash-up after the breastfeeding pictorial frenzy on Facebook, it seems that Facebook has come out and specified exactly what their problem was with with photos they had considered obscene. From this we ought to be able to tell whether Facebook discriminates against breastfeeding, i.e. whether they are anti-breastfeeding or not.
There are two broad types of discrimination: direct and indirect. Direct is where a policy directly targets a subject. Indirect is where a policy happens to disproportionately affect a subject.
Their stated policy on photographs was that they would mark as obscene any photo showing nipple or aureole. Apparently this is a similar policy to those used by media companies in the United States.
This policy would not appear to directly discriminate against breastfeeding (as it doesn’t mention it at all), and it doesn’t appear to indirectly discriminate either (as when a child is feeding, then certainly nipple and probably aureole will be covered). So, it would appear that Facebook’s policy is not anti-breastfeeding. Of course, it could still be that Facebook staff are misapplying the policy, but then it is individuals at Facebook, and not Facebook itself that are at fault.
It is interesting to contrast with another popular community website: Wikipedia. They deal with the issue by actively ignoring any consideration of obscenity or offensiveness. It is against Wikipedia’s policies to even declare a page to be unsuitable for children. And there are some pretty full-on pages, as you would see if you searched for the obvious topics (although, warning: those pages are probably not safe for work).
I wonder whose policies are better in this case – Facebook’s or Wikipedia’s?
January 8, 2009 at 5:39 am
My instinct would be with Facebook, but not sure i’d stick with that if i sat through an intelligent argument. Thanx for the clarification, Andrew (taking your word for all that).
And MMS, excellent essay, more thought-through than many (as yours always are). I hated my breasts all my adult life – then when i had a baby, it was such a relief. They’d always just hung around and suddenly they were functioning! I still never got to like them as much as my babies did, though.
I don’t think society in general will be comfortable with bfg images until it’s usual to see mothers in soap operas etc breastfeeding as a matter of course. The BBC got complaints for showing a new mum breastfeed on a preschoolers’ programme, which surprises me. The number of small children who used to come and ask what the baby was doing, and were interested and usually charmed when i explained baby was feeding on my milk. ‘Just like a cow’ is no insult to me – it’s nice to be a mammal. 80)
I think the ‘milk production line’ feeling is part of being physically and emotionally overwhelmed and/or overtouched during the baby/toddler stage of one’s children’s lives. It certainly doesn’t mean bfg is too extreme to be doing for as long as a mother happens to do it.
But you knew that.
January 8, 2009 at 8:00 am
Andrew, I understand what you’ve said but I have a couple of issues with it. Firstly, the policies ARE being misapplied. And disproportionately, it seems, on images that show extended breastfeeding (where even less of the breast is visible because the child’s head is bigger!) or tandem feeding, or pregnant women feeding. Which suggests to me that the problem IS with a squeamishness about breastfeeding. Doulas who have included breastfeeding promotion type posters on their facebook pages have had those removed as well. One man who posted a breastfeeding image with words over it (If you don’t like to see breastefeeding please put a blanket over your head) – words which obscured what was in the picture – had that removed. And one of the women (Emma Kwansica) who is training with the same organisation as me, had a photograph removed which was then printed in a newspaper. (It was of tandem feeding). So it’s not just that individual staff may be misapplying the policy – there are too many cases (and specific types of cases) for that. Facebook has come out and said that it supports breastfeeding but actions speak louder than words, you know?
The other problem I have with it is that unless they are removing images of other infant feeding (bottles) then it IS discriminatory. When I breastfeed, my areola shows. Facebook says this is obscene. I say it is testament to the fact that women’s body parts come in different shaps and sizes. Is my breastfeeding not okay, but someone else’s is?
When you apply a blanket ‘obscenity’ rule to breastfeeding, it sounds to some people like you’re just being egalitarian. Nudity is nudity, right? Well, if that were true, would it be okay for a non-breastfeeding woman to expose her breast in a shopping centre, becasuse it’s okay for me to do so in the course of breastfeeding? And conversely, would it be okay for security to escort me off the premises for breastfeeding in a public place because it’s nudity?
I know people don’t like ‘different rules’ because it makes their heads hurt but this is one situation where they are very much appropriate. Not only from an anti-discrimination perspective, but for common sense.
And I am already seeing blog posts/forum comments about how some women are feeling a renewed uneasiness about breastfeeding in public over this. They hear that although there’s a lot of anti-Facebook stuff around, there are a lot of people shouting Hell Yeah, get those pictures down! too. And what’s more, a major company with a large role in a lot of people’s lives is refusing to back down on this. How will that help the confidence of women who fear that they will be challenged in their local food court? Will they trust that the patrons/staff who ignorantly harrass them will back down when they tell them it’s discrimination to move them? Facebook has an opportunity there to be the ‘bigger person’ and say, yeah, we screwed up, breastfeeding isn’t obscene, we won’t remove breastfeeding photos because we think breastfeeding is lovely and beneficial for humans and we’re sorry we discriminated against people, especially since in our state of California such discrimination in a public place or place of work would be illegal. Oh, and while we’re at it, we’ll get rid of some of those nasty ‘jokes’ showing naked penises on people’s funwalls, and some of those semi-nude shots of fifteen year olds to boot.
Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
January 8, 2009 at 5:28 pm
[...] breastfeeding is not obscene’ some time ago. After reading some posts today, like this one and this one, and this page, I decided to go a step further and post some of [...]
January 12, 2009 at 3:15 am
Heck, i said ‘My instinct would be with Facebook’ – what? I meant Wikipedia! That’ll teach me to comment in haste.
January 16, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Okay – clearly Facebook’s policies are not being followed. Presumably they are aware of this, given the amount of effort people are putting into making this stuff public. So, it’s rather weak of them to hide behind it.
Since I lean on the side of “more information is better than less information”, I also would go with the Wikipedia policy. However, I know that not everyone’s comfortable with that. It is difficult to please everyone, but you should at least be able to be upfront about what you’re doing.