I just really don’t like the idea of associating sex with breastfeeding. And I know that there is a lot of people who will look at the Jolie photo and think “oooh, sexy” over “oooh, natural”.

I was at a friend’s house this morning for coffee and her 18 month old son was lifting my shirt to see my belly and saying ‘Baby’. Then he grabbed my boob and said “Boobies for baby”. I didn’t even flinch at this and neither did my friend (who breastfed).
Later I recounted the story to another friend, who has no children and who was a little appalled that this boy child had touched my breast and I hadn’t chastised him (and neither had his mother).
I thought it was really sad that the little boy had the right idea (my boobs ARE just for the baby), but my other friend thought the touching was overly sexual.

I wonder if her reaction would have been the same if it had been a girl child who touched me.

Not that Jolie isn’t any less sexy because she breastfeeds or that I feel any less sexy because I am pregnant (after all, my boobs are HUGE), but it irks me that there would be people wanting to ‘get off’ to this pic (or the Babytalk pic) and I think that is just wrong. And I know that more people will look at the magazine with that ‘getting off’ in mind than those that are looking at it because it is a beautiful picture of a mother and child. Which is a great shame.

i guess it just makes me sad that this is what it takes – angelina doing something on a cover to make it not only acceptable, but making it beautiful, and come on, HOT.

thank you all for your comments, you had very insightful things to say and they actually made me think a lot more about this! i am already thinking of other topics to write about…well, specifically topics concerning breasts. they are pretty interesting, and i agree dollyann that they seem to be hypersexualized. it’s almost funny.

so, breastfeed away, and thanks for reading!

-Harlequin

That is disturbing–who would look at that Babytalk cover and worry about a curious boy or horny dude? What possible effect could it have? Arousal? Ooookay, pretty unlikely, but if that’s the case, then what? America really needs to get over these weird puritanical notions.

The celebrity covers are helping undo those weird puritanical notions by showing celebrity women in all their maternal glory. 5o years ago, just the word, “pregnant,” was taboo because it implied sexual intercourse. Women hid away while pregnant. Lucille Ball broke ground by showing her “expecting” self and incorporated her pregnancy into the storyline of her t.v. show. That was major for the time. These covers help normalize something that is completely natural–childbirth.

But you’re correct about something not being right. They do reinforce oppressive expectations for beauty. The women they show are known for their beauty. Babytalk has avoided that by focusing on the breast as an object, but with a white, blue-eyed baby. That’s a whole other issue. The expectations for beauty still come through. “This is what a beautiful baby looks like.”
Notice, they are all white. Imagine the impact of the W or Vanity Fair cover featuring a woman of color.

Okay, seriously though, whether we like it or not, our (America’s) celebrities are who we go to to set our standards and speak for us en mass. This isn’t new. People have been doing this since the beginning of time, usually through seeking the advice of the local royals.

Ms Jolie is not alone in her determination to set a calculated example through her celebrity, (most of us would, one way or another, and if not calculated then simply by default), and while I personally suspect that some of the more outlandish things she did back in her early years were, in part, to “shock,” not uncommon behavior for a college-age girl, now I suggest that as a result of maturity she’s begun to direct her life and influence towards opening minds. Hell, maybe her motivation has always been that, not that she was going to get very far with that whole Billy Bob vial-o-blood thing.

But I digress.

Yes, the Pitt-Jolie clan will profit from America’s desire – indeed, the human desire – to live vicariously through the wealthy and beautiful. So goes life.

Personally I am glad that Angelina is hawking responsible mothering through promoting breastfeeding. It’s not like motherhood isn’t sold corporate capitalistically and constantly by massive companies with deplorable profit-driven motives twenty-four hours a day already. She is, in many ways, and as you suggested, selling and promoting empowerment.

And, people not in the business are often so confused about the acting profession. Here’s a short primer:

Actors are their their own commodity. They don’t sell computers; they sell their image, and, when they have it, their talent. They would never just give away any of this, just as Apple wouldn’t give away computers. How would they – the actors – negotiate their pay when their next gig rolled around if they were giving their commodity away for free all willy-nilly like, even if it was for a good cause?

In business it is understood that when you give something away you cheapen it. It’s human nature, especially when steeped in a society structured around capitalism, to assign a free thing less value than something that’s paid for, and furthermore, more value to something that’s name brand than not. Why, then, would the biggest names in Hollywood give away photos of themselves/their offspring?

They do often donate the profit from the selling of the rights of such images to charity. probably to find a halfway point between giving them away for free, and outright profiting from them.

And as far as taking advantage of people during these hard times… during the Great Depression going to the movies helped keep the roiling masses from slipping even further into despair. And sure, we could interpret the act of the film studios pumping out films for profit as “taking advantage” of said masses, again, the masses demanded entertainment; it would have been incredibly stupid business not to fill this demand, and as the post I’ve linked supposes, also detrimental for national moral.

Today these magazines are America’s last truly affordable form of escapism. Film-going is too costly to partake in weekly, or, for many, even monthly. (I can’t even afford cable). And lucky us, that we aren’t also being brainwashed by The Hays Code / Breen Office censorship.

Yes, remember all those astonishingly squeaky-clean films/television shows from the 1930s-60s that didn’t even begin to depict the reality of daily life (the words “sex,” or “pregnant” were verboten and married couples slept in separate beds, etc.) and the fallout that came with it (think, um, the Reagan Era and just about ever horrid, saccharine-laced sitcom made in the 80s). Really, thank, in part, Hays and the Great Depression for that.

I suspect that that part of history is partial contributor to mainstream, modern America’s fairly pervasive discomfort with/ambivalence towards the female breast. That filmmakers had to sneak around the code to depict reality (sex, love, nudity, showing JUST enough to suggest it, but not show it) made all these normal things subversive elements in our collective consciousness.

And I do find it telling that the author of this piece squawked at the sight of a *baby-feeding* breast. Americans, and this author, perhaps, seem to routinely misinterpret the sight of a breast doing its most basic work as sexualizing motherhood – and the nipple is the flash point, as you have to expose the nipple to feed the baby.

Yeah, we get our panties in a bunch over it, because, I can only assume, we are subconsciously interpreting the woman/baby/nipple image in question as the sexualizing of our *own* mothers (not to get too Freudian on you)…

Or, maybe we’re just freaked out because we’re uncomfortable with associating babies with sexuality in general (throwback to shame and the concept of original sin?), which we do because, again, we, in the 20th century, over-sexualized (hid/marginalized) the nipple in the first place

Whatever, I suspect that it all springs from a combination of a 16th century puritanical heritage and mid-20th century entertainment-code conditioning. Who really knows, but that seems as good a theory as any to me.

All *I* know is folks don’t react this way/take this mental leap in most of Europe. :O)

p.s. Sorry for the length of this, but your post really tickled my brain.

It’s weird that we can’t see women breastfeeding without giving the mother and baby some kind of creepy porn status. Really thoughtul post!