Shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

Babies! Breasts! The horror!

I do hope that none of my readers here are Gravely Offended by the magazine coverto the right. I mean — it’s a baby, right? And a breast. And a baby latched onto a breast. Which is a natural and non-sexual and good thing, right? And it’s on a magazine about babies, and illustrating an article about mothers and breastfeeding, right? And, heck, as far as you can actually tell from the picture, it’s really just an elbow, right?

So why are folks going so …crazily offended over this cover?

“I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine,” one person wrote. “I immediately turned the magazine face down,” wrote another. “Gross,” said a third.

I’m … amazed.

Shocked to see a “giant breast” on a cover? It’s a magazine about babies! Turning the magazine face-down? Why? What are you seeing here that’s so offensive? Gross? What’s gross about it?

Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies. Yet in a poll of more than 4,000 readers, a quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo — a baby and part of a woman’s breast, in profile — inappropriate.

Well I’m glad it was only a quarter. But why was it inappropriate?

One mother who didn’t like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it. “I shredded it,” said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. “A breast is a breast — it’s a sexual thing. He didn’t need to see that.”

Um … a breast is a mammary gland, designed primarily for the feeding of babies. And in this context, it’s clearly being used for this purpose. Breasts are secondarily a “sexual thing.” And maybe your 13-year-old does in fact need to see this picture just to understand that.

And, as someone who’s both male and has had a healthy obsession over breasts for quite a number of years, I can guarantee that this is one of the least sexual pictures of breasts I’ve seen — and trivially sexual compared to any number of pictures of breast visible in any mainstream magazine. Really.

“Gross, I am sick of seeing a baby attached to a boob,” wrote Lauren, a mother of a 4-month-old.

That particular comment just makes me shake my head.

Now this all ties into the issue of public breast feeding, though, to my mind, a bit tangentially — there’s a difference between what you see on a magazine cover and what you see in a restaurant, grocery store, or city park, regardless of the subject. To me, at least, there’s a distinction between photos and reality, between “live and Memorex.” So I can understand varying levels of comfort/discomfort with public breast feeding — I believe it can and should be legal, but that there are politeness and social
interaction issues (in both directions) that we’re all working through.

But as much as I am, as Margie says, a “boob man,”it’s clear that the American obsession (positive and negative) about breasts is out of hand (so to speak) when a magazine photo like this provokes such viscerally negative responses.

(via Les)