Fucking puritanism
By glazou on Monday 7 August 2006, 11:13 - Bushisms - Permalink
Apparently, this image, that no european would ever care of, the cover of Babytalk magazine shocked so many people in the US it triggered a new poll : 57% of the people are against breast-feeding a baby in public and an incredible 72% think it's unappropriate to show breast-feeding of a baby on television. A mother of a four month old baby sent this line to Babytalk to complain "Gross, I am sick of seeing a baby attached to a boob". Oh dear, she needs a shrink ! And another one wrote "I was offended and it made my husband very uncomfortable when I left the magazine on the coffee table." Well, if her husband is "very uncomfortable" because of such a cover, there are only two options : (a) he's a lier (b) a very partial view of a woman's breast gave him an erection, he and his wife having two children because they had sex only twice... Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, even said ''A breast is a breast -- it's a sexual thing" ; Gayle, you should really document yourself about this part of your anatomy before making yourself totally ridiculous in all the newspapers of the world.
A famous french author mocked, 342 years ago, religious posers : "Cachez ce sein que je ne saurais voir". The US should start living in the 21st century and forget about the 17th...
BTW, in Sweden, nearly 100% of women breast-feed babies. In public. In Spain, that's an outstanding 92% if I recall correctly.
Oh, and while we're here, sex is good.
Update: merci à PolarPaulo de m'avoir passé le lien vers le sexoblogomachin de Maïa Mazaurette, qui comme d'habitude pour ce qui touche à la femme quand elle a l'idée saugrenue de vouloir ou apprécier être mère, se déchaîne et se rend - de mon point de vue en tous cas - encore plus ridicule que les puritains américains sur le sujet. Ne pas rater non plus certains des commentaires sur son article, pesant de peanuts garanti...

Comments
For our non French readers, please know that in France, on very popular TV shows, a shrink/med/whatever named Marcel Ruffo often delivers his "lemme tell you how to raise kids" talks and is widely followed. That guy considers that breastfeeding is a sexual offense, that mommy's boobs are daddy's toys, and is prompt to send social police (ooops apparently we should say "services"...) to mom's who are breastfeeding "too old" babies (meaning 6 month old for him)...
See, we can find all kind of "scarlet letter"-type morons on each side of the atlantic. We just seem to have different breeds of morons. Such a beautiful world.
My wife had often feed our babies, sitten on a chair in the middle of a great store in belgium, without problems ...
About Ruffo: agreed, he's a dick, but he's not as widely followed as stated above. True, he shows on TV once in a blue moon, and tries to leverage its past success in helping teenagers to force its way into the mainstream psycho-crowd. But reactions to breastfeeding or breast-related pictures is nowhere nearly as intense on this side of the Atlantic as it seems to be in the US.
About breastfeeding: OMGLOLBBQ... It's incredible how anal-retentive people may get about these issues. My wife still breastfeeds our 18-month old daughter, sometimes in public, so what's the big deal ? South of France may be a bit more relaxed about those issues than Paris, but I doubt she would get thrown out of a café even there...
"Cachez ce sein que je ne saurais voir" - Tartuffe, Molière
www.classic-novels.com/au...
US is crazy. They're trying to allow the stupid part of the country to collapse the rest in the mistaken understaning of freedom protection.
I was on a train last year where there was a woman wanting to breatfeed. She was moved up to first class, to give her a bigger and more comfortable seat, and given a warm blanket by one of the train staff. The kid was at least a year old too.
That's in Britain, of course - by the sounds of things that women would have been witch-hunted off the train at the earliest opportunity in the US.
Breast feeding is a perfectly natural thing to do - but so is sex. If we don't allow sex in public, why breast feeding?
Breasts *are* a sexual object. Yes, they are also a feeding device.
If its not apropriate for a woman to hang her tits out in public, why is it O.K. as long as a baby is hanging off of it?
Yes, you have to afeed your baby, but why not use a breast pump, or find some place secluded. A crowded subway is not secluded.
I wonder if they are the same people who are fine with showing giant pictures of aborted fetuses on the side of the road.
In France, we have nacked women on balcony ...
sunfox.org/blog/2006/08/0...
Shocking !!!
john: first, you cannot always use a breast pump and milk cannot be preserved more than 2 or 3 hours outside of a fridge. Second, a hungry baby cannot wait, should not wait. Third, secluded ??? If a breast is a sexual thing and if the woman is not totally isolated, then it's still offensive, right ? Can you find such a place in shopping mall ? In a train ? In a plane ?!? In a park ? Have you ever dealt with that ? So there's no "more secluded" ; it's in public or it's not, there's no in-between here.
So we only thought "ah, they forgot to close the curtains or they just don't care ; either way, that's none of our business, let's look somewhere else."
US are such a strange country, where bonobos can fuck on National Geographic TV at least once a week... Where young women on the beach wear minimalistic bath suits that are MUCH MORE sexually attractive than a baby sucking milk from a turgescent breast. But where a woman cannot breast-feed a baby.
The whole thing comes - again - from fanatic american christians having to affirm the true nature of god, and then needing to show humans beings are not animals. We ARE animals, and breast-feeding is not only natural and healthy, it's the ONLY good way of feeding a baby. Like it or not. Read again "The Naked Ape" written by Desmond Morris.
Puritanism will eventually destroy the US and its way of life.
marc: I perfectly remember a fiesta at a friend's place in paris. From the 8th floor living-room windows, we could see a couple making love in their bedroom three floors below on the other side of the street. Very very hot... Did we call the police ? Nope. Did we feel offended ? Certainly not. Did we keep looking at it ? Nope, we all had more real at home
@john
> "Breasts *are* a sexual object. Yes, they are also a feeding device."
wrong!
Breasts *are* a feeding device. Yes, they can be also considered a sexual object.
[Yet they do not play any part in the physical reproduction act]
Remember, we are mamals.
Gosh I hate puritanism...
Gosh I love boobies *_*
(sorry this talk is waaaay to sexually explicit for sexually obsessed devil like me :p )
>Puritanism will eventually destroy the US and its way of life.
puritanism and other zealous religious are just a danger to all good people.
I hope USA will stop the madness.
Jerome -
This is from "Sex Roles: A Journal of Research" Aug 1988:
Brown & Konner (1987) suggested that when humans were subject to varying periods of famine and plenty, the most reproductively successful females were the ones who were able to store surplus energy as fat. The extra fat, stored on the body, breasts, and buttocks, is said therefore to be attractive to males (Anderson, Crawford, Nadeau & Lindberg, 1992; Cant, 1981; Low, 1979). Frisch and others (Frisch, 1990; Frisch & McArthur, 1974) have shown that this is a plausible theory because they demonstrated that it is necessary for women to have a critical amount of body fat in order to initiate and maintain the menstrual cycle.
.... so Men find women attractive based on their breast size. How can they not be considered a sexual device?