December 12–19, 1996

loose canon

Unlawful Lactation

Breasts — on men or on women — are just not among my personal fetishes.

Airplanes, LCD's, newspaper honor boxes and gorgeous gams give me stuff to obsess on now and again. But a view of mammary glands, or the sight of a child taking nourishment from a lactating female, doesn't set off a round of fireworks over my mental landscape.

That I don't have a breast obsession is probably a pity, I suppose, since I recently returned from a French island in the Caribbean where women (and men, too!) swim without tops. The major thrill was just not there — neither for me, nor apparently for anyone else on the beach, in whom I observed no special fits of furious desire.

In my personal sexual schemata, breasts on men and women are indeed somewhat erotic, but really less so than people's mouths. And since our culture hasn't yet degenerated so far as to force us to cover our mouths, I can't figure why we do bother covering our breasts. Except maybe to keep warm.

Silly me, I am wrong-headed as usual. In America, breasts are as big as they ever have been, and probably because this cultural fetish continues to be so marketable. To make breasts any less of a taboo would probably mean that some people would lose their jobs.

Which is what makes Councilman Ortiz's recently proposed legislation guaranteeing a woman's right to breast-feed anywhere and anytime she wants such a necessary step to protect human rights, and such a pathetic sign of our times.

Apparently, we've come to a place where we need a law which says that nursing mothers are not to be segregated from the rest of humanity. There have apparently been many instances of nursing women being forced to retreat to public restrooms to feed their infants.

That is outrageous.

And this ostracizing trend appears to be increasing. According to Ortiz's office, there is pending legislation in New Jersey to limit breast-feeding in public.

Though 12 other states have taken steps to block the criminalization of breast-feeding by declaring through legislation that it is not "indecent exposure," if the Philadelphia law passes, we will be the first place on earth which makes suckling an infant in public a protected right.

Why does this victory make me feel so sad?

I guess it is pathetic that a basic human necessity, like an infant taking nourishment, has to be enumerated among our inalienable rights. Makes you wonder if we'll next have to guarantee the right to breathe. Though considering the air in New Jersey, maybe that's not such a bad idea.

I wonder, though, what goes through the mind of someone who ushers a nursing mother out of view and into a back room? What is this need to treat breast-feeding as if it were a private, almost obscene act? And will we next need to protect children from the gruesome sight of nursing puppies and kittens?