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Date: | Tue, 19 Aug 1997 15:48:51 -0400 |
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Here is today's Camille Paglia column from the online magazine, Salon.
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Breastfeeding is becoming a bogey of the '90s.
Here in Australia we have mother A suing
mother B for breastfeeding mother A's children
and governments legislating to prevent women
selling their breast milk (while allowing the sale
of blood and sperm). On the other hand, there
are women using public (and aggressive)
displays of breastfeeding as some form of
political statement. How can such a natural and
essentially mammalian activity become a
political football?
Signed: Chthonic Youth
Dear Youth:
I'm sure Salon readers will be as
fascinated as I
am by your bulletin from Australia.
Breastfeeding has gotten some attention in the
United States through a few controversies over
whether public nursing violates
local ordinances
forbidding indecent exposure.
However, the selling of breast milk has never
been an issue here at all. Is this a
new wrinkle
in Australian entrepreneurship? Will mother's
milk be your next export? We're very happy
with Nicole Kidman and Foster's beer. Please
show us more!
Possibly there is some currently untestable
health hazard in unpasteurized breast milk.
Otherwise, I fail to see how government has
the right to ban its sale. By my
libertarian code,
each person has the right to dispose of his or
her body as he or she wishes --
including selling
organs, fluids or hair. (Until the
invention of
dynel, impoverished Italian women's shorn
locks made the wigs of the world. Three
millennia of olive oil gave us an edge.)
The politicizing of public breastfeeding
began in
the 1960s, when hippie women went braless
and shoeless at love-ins and rock
festivals and
began to push the envelope governing public
displays of affection. It's a debatable
point: To
what extent in modern Western culture is
exposure of the breast, a secondary sex organ,
inherently erotic? (There was a recent flap in
Toronto over women winning the male right to
go bare-chested.) And to what extent does
breastfeeding, a utilitarian
function, resemble
other "natural" activities? -- some of
which are
publicly permitted (eating and drinking) and
some not (urination, defecation, sexual
intercourse).
As with most sexual conventions, the laws will
change if enough people defy them. But the
majority of women at this time don't appear to
be particularly eager to make
militant spectacles
of themselves and their infants.
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