Such a wonderful collection of thoughts, and so many of them strike to the 
heart of how complex nursing is, and how many varied responses individuals 
might have in their problems with it.

I think there has been great merit in every insight given so far.

Personally, what always strikes me, is that the battle ground is centred on 
who controls a woman's body.  We like to think we live in a free and 
uncensored world, but we live with strict restrictive codes on most things: 
it's only that they are different restrictive codes from previous ones.  I 
do think we progress slowly and gently, but that we are still liiving in a 
society that is quite restrictive.

Women's bodies is a huge cultural battleground, and even in areas such as 
the sex industry, where we like to think women are in control and strong and 
active in their own personal pursuit of income and pleasure through their 
bodies.  However, the reality is that of total exploitation and lack of 
meaningful control is far a more prevalent model than that of the self 
assured women in charge.  Not to mention that these 'freedoms' are heavily 
controlled and regulated by law.

We live in a society that is obessed with 'the male gaze': a theory of 
cinema spectatorship from the 1970s, in which a wonderful feminist film 
writer called Laura Mulvey, pointed out that men always have the controlling 
gaze in cinema.  The man looks, and the women is looked at.  In the 
audience, the male is supposed to identify with the male hero - and want to 
be the one looking and in charge.  The female is supposed to identify with 
the heroine being looked at, and she must paint her face, and buy clothes, 
and align her body in a way that it can be looked at by men.  Her power is 
in attracting the gaze upon her.  It is passive compared to the power of the 
man to look and contain her in his gaze.

This theory came out at an interesting moment in how pornography changed, 
again in the 1970s.  Previously, porn images with women in them tended to 
have the woman looking straight at the camera - an active particpant in the 
taking of her picture, and in terms of looking back at the male admirer.  If 
you look at early last century 'porn' images of vaudevill and burlesque 
stars, the woman are looking straight at you, via the camera.  Very proud 
and straight forward.

In the 1970s, 'Playboy' began to take different sorts of photographs, of 
women who were pretending they were not being photographed.  It was a true 
voyeur set up - where the camera was a man peeking at a women undressing 
etc, whilst she was oblivious to his presence.  Views of her body were 
'stolen' by the male, and there was a marked difference in how women in 
centrefolds were presented.  They began to look away from the camera, look 
sideways, etc, and not present the bold one-on-one eyeline position.  One 
now generally only finds direct eyeline matching is pornography where the 
women is being presented not as a sexual object, but as a sexuallly active 
dominant.

On the surface, the women in films now, have little in common with the women 
in films in the 1970s.  However, if you analyse both their role in the 
narrative, and how they are gazed at, little has changed.  A fact quite 
easily missed in the all the glitz and glamour of the high action films we 
have today, is that the only significant change in the female's role is she 
now gets to be intelligent whilst she is both looked at, and handed out as 
the sexual prize at the end of the narrative to the male hero (as always).  
I have presented this to many a class of teenagers and adults alike, whilst 
looking at Trinity in the Matrix, and Lara Croft in the TombRaider films.  
Everyone is very shocked to see that these supposedly strong female heros 
are in fact just slightly more physically active, and more intelligent than 
their predecessors: they are still there to be looked at and captured by the 
male gaze.  Lara Croft could not be more maleable to male fantasy if she 
tried: she's locked in a computer game where male fingers press buttons to 
control her every move.  Yet part of her fantasy in that she in in control.  
In the film posters, Lara Croft always looks to one side, and down.

Nursing an infant is extremely problematic in this paradigm.  For a nursing 
mother makes two statements that I feel are very difficult for our culture 
to accept.  One, she is not interested in the male looking at her.  She has 
clearly signalled she's not interested in being looked at as a sexual object 
of desire, and is not at all interested in being 'captured' by him.  This is 
an afront to the male who feels he is in control of looking.  It is also 
very strangely a mixed message to the women also looking on - for as had 
been commented many times before, it is often older women who get more 
outraged than men.  There is a sub-text here that, to me, suggests that some 
women see the nursing mother as a competing sexual object - as if the sight 
of her body will capture _her_ husband's view to the nursing mother.  So a 
competition is entered into, and the aghast women insist this object of her 
husband's desire is removed from sight.

Secondly, she is not only not interested in the people looking at her - male 
or female - she is soley interested in her child.  All her attention is 
centred on her infant.  I feel this goes against both her being there as a 
male object of desire AND is a double affront in that she has excluded that 
male from the dynamic she is sharing with the infant.  We are scared by 
infants in this world of ours.  We seek to see them as disruptive, ill 
disciplined and a drain.  We constantly talk of how they wreck our lives 
with their demands and how we must 'train' them to be less disruptive.  
Somehow, it is a fearful sight, to see a mother so involved in her infant, 
and so loving of that infant to the exclusion of others.  The woman who has 
said "I'm not interesed in you looking at me, go away" and "I am actually 
interested in this child, not you"!  Cheeky wench!

A nursing mother takes control of her own body, and uses it as she sees fit. 
  She rejects the idea that society at large, or the people in the space 
around her, can control both what she does with her body, and _who she gives 
it to_.  In a world where women gain their status and power by how many men 
look at her - a nursing mother is a problem.  Either she is competing for 
male gaze, or she is rejecting it utterly.  Both positions are problematic 
for others around her.

She is also, as I stated, giving her body over to another - her infant.  As 
a society, we like to think this no longer happens: women no longer give 
over their bodies to their husbands etc.  Yet how many of us have heard the 
statements about not breastfeeding as the breasts 'belong' to the 
husband/partner?  Giving her breast to her infant appear to be even worse 
than given it over to her husband, as the child is then the interloper in 
male power over the wife.  How often does our society position children as 
the thorny problem in the husband/wife relationship?  Where the wife is now 
more concerend with her children than the person she 'should' be concerned 
with - the male?

Therefore I see all the fuss about nursing mothers as a battle about women's 
bodies: and who is in charge of them.  Both physically, and in terms of 
gaze.   From this primal aversion to a women being in control of her own 
body, and excluding herself from the power of those looking at her, all the 
other situations already mentioned arise.  The mind looks for reasons _why_ 
it is discomforted by what she's doing, and all the other prejudices and 
personal issues arise.

Hoping this makes some sense... :-)

Morgan Gallagher
Online Lactaneer
Nursing 27 month old infant, with full loving support of that nice male 
person I'm legally chained too!  ;-)

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