Breasts: Both sexual and maternal

A British parenting magazine claims that breast-feeding can be "creepy," says the Daily Telegraph's Rowan Pelling. Is our culture so sexually-fixated that we're uncomfortable with breasts' true purpose?

breasts
(Image credit: Corbis)

A "provocative" article in a British parenting magazine claims that breasts are now so sexualized that letting your child feed on them seems "a little creepy." Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?, asks Rowan Pelling in the Daily Telegraph. While it's true that "blue-blooded women" outsourced their breast-feeding to wet nurses for centuries, for fear that nursing would be "unsavoury" or somehow unattractive, haven't we reached a point where the breast can be "simultaneously nurturing and erotic"? Mothers revulsed at the idea of feeding their children are just victims of the "contemporary cult of pneumatic bosoms." An excerpt:

"Seldom, outside the crudest lads' mags, has it been so trumpeted that the breast's real function is as perky showroom ware. The [parenting magazine] article is perturbing evidence of how far Barbie culture has penetrated the mainstream: The surreal Hollywood dream where a gravity-defying bosom is more normal – and more laudable – than offering breast milk to a hungry little baby...

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