You’re at a restaurant and you see this woman, but something isn't right. What’s wrong? She’s cradling this little baby whilst it feeds on her breast. What would your reaction be? Even though seeing that will make you uncomfortable, you let her be and go about your life because you’re a sympathetic human being. Or are you going to be that jerk that that calls her out for it and calls it “disgusting”...? If your answer is the latter…GTFO. I will not allow some creepy 30-something year old man that still hides his porn under his bed from his mother exclaiming that breastfeeding is “disgusting” as he reads my article.
Yes, it is awkward when you see a woman’s more-than-often, bare breast to feed a baby in public, but what the heck can she do? A baby has no set circadian cycle in which his/her body is able to adjust to a eating cycle. So if a baby is crying for food at the mall, the mom has to feed the baby somehow, especially during his/her breastfeeding stage. I’m no science major, but I think that’s how it goes.
Wait what? Boobs do more than create a sexual aethesutic that men can jerk off to? Well, yes ignorant reader (just in case that a**hole is still reading), breasts aren't to please the male gaze! In fact, the biological purpose for women’s breast is to feed the young! How fascinating is this! Christine, tell me more! Well, did you know there’s no such thing as equality for women? Yup.
Recently I watched this video where a guy conducted a social experiment where he had two different women—one is breastfeeding her baby and the other woman wears a low-cut, tight t-shirt that shows off her cleavage. This guy had both women to sit on this bench at some shopping mall and both had different reactions. The woman with the tight t-shirt got some looks and a guy flirting with her (that poor fool). However the woman breastfeeding her child received negative feedback, people calling her “disgusting” and the frequent phase “ma'am, can you not do that?” was thrown in her direction; and she didn't get reactions like that from only men, even a pair of teenage girls did the same thing! Holy crap, even other females are discouraging the woman to feed her baby in public.
Here’s the video:
It’s one thing to call out on a breastfeeding woman, but what the last part of the video revealed something really messed up. A man approaches both women sitting on another bench together and he explains that the woman in the cleavage-revealing top is more acceptable than a woman breastfeeding her child. Not like there’s anything wrong with wearing a shirt showing off your boobs a bit, but still? What?
What kind of society have we become that women are sexualized to the point that once they are seen as people that do simple tasks like breastfeeding her baby has become a foreign concept? For crying out loud, a woman can not be sexualized when eating a frickin’ burger during a Superbowl commercial. Even a breast cancer charity organization has forgotten that they have to “save the women” first before “sav[ing] the boobies.”
Remember when Heidi Klumm flashed the world with her boob at the beach? She was literally saving one of her kids and their nanny from drowning. Yet the media freaks out because she flashed a little boob after dragging out both her child and the nanny. So of course, the tabloids focuses on her bare boob hanging about instead the fact that she saved two people.
The social experiment depicts society’s idea of a woman as a plaything, a sexual piece of meat that serves to the male gaze. It’s even teaching young girls that something natural like breastfeeding is frowned upon. What’s next? Hair on her armpits, god forbid. People sexualize literally two lumps of fat hanging on a woman’s chest. When I say it like that, boobs aren’t so sexy anymore, aren’t they?
Social media flashes images of women with the ideal “t*ts” that people don't even remember that breasts are for breastfeeding children. How does a bodily function gets lost in translation to the sexualization of women? Society pushes these concepts to women about how to be beautiful with certain attributes like a nice pair of boobs. But once seen as human beings, breastfeeding or boob-flashing women are shunned or ridiculed because they dared to provide important nutrients to their babies or they decided to save some lives during a random beach day.
I’ll be real with you: I’m sick and tired for being sexualized or expected to be — and so is every single female person out there.