Breastfeeding is the default! : Six Apart: following the American trend against breastfeeding?

cangetmad
2006-07-29 11:38 (link)

I read about this elsewhere the other day. Profoundly bizarre. It would take a particular type of self-hatred for a breastfeeding mother to find herself obscene and require herself to hide away, as some of the quotes there show - one shredded the cover to stop her 13-year-old son seeing it, because "A breast is a breast -- it's a sexual thing. He didn't need to see that."

I don't know. It just made me want to cry.

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(Anonymous)
2006-08-02 05:30 (link)

It's following the ridiculous trend of pre-emptive offense. It's the same backward, craven thinking that got Melanie Martinez fired from the Good Night Show on PBS/Sprout. It's the reason why there's a time delay on the very tame acts that play live at sporting events and Janet Jackson is pretty much blacklisted from live television to this day. It's why corporations are dropping their support of artistic and creative programs, or anything that has any whiff of sexuality attached to it like an AIDS charity.

The idea is to protect the business of the lowest common denominator of kneejerking prude and unthinking neanderthal. The dollar reigns paramount and progressives and thinking people are far, far, far less likely to call a boycott or even write a letter than regressives who are always on the lookout for the latest moral outrage (real or imagined) and happily take marching orders from people who make a very, very healthy living from creating tempests in teapots over non-issues like "oh no, an actress played a role seven years ago" or "16 pixels out of the 1,000 in this icon are of areola!"

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dreamalynn
2006-08-02 05:30 (link)

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phoenixw
2006-08-12 21:24 (link)

Is SixApart's anti-breastfeeding decision representative of an American trend against public breastfeeding, as Pandagon suggests?

I don't think so. It's a socially conservative position that reflects current US politics and a resistance to the progress that we've seen in terms of rights for women and children. So while there may have been some backsliding, we've still got a net gain.

I think social progress is made by increments, and for many of the gains that we achieve, there will be backlash and backsliding. I can only hope it's temporary, and that rationality will prevail as some of the older proponents of conservative culture die out.

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