The British Battle of Breastfeeding vs Bottle

Deputy Editor of the UK’s Mother & Baby magazine Katherine Blundell formulated a storm of controversy with this month’s opinion piece in the magazine titled “I Formula-fed...So What?”. Her article described how she “couldn’t be fagged” (bothered) to nurse, expressed concern that her “fun bags” would be irrevocably ruined, and ultimately dismissed breastfeeding as “creepy”.

Women around the world have reacted, creating a Facebook page demanding an apology from the magazine that has already attracted over 1,200 fans, and there have been scores of news articles, blogs, and comments. Scanning all of these, there are the expected OMG’s, gasps of indignation, arguments refuting Blundell’s thinking, and personal infant feeding stories. Probably 99% of the commentary is being generated and read by women. I couldn’t help but laugh at one writer describing the “age-old” debate of bottle vs breast, considering formula has only existed for about five generations!

Only a handful of commentators have latched on to what I feel is at the root of this issue – the oversexualization of the female breast in Western culture. Clearly Blundell thinks of her chest primarily as sexual apparatus and has a hard time reconciling the image of a perky bosom begging to be fondled by a lover with feeding an infant. And who can blame her? Our society is saturated with pictures of young fashionistas popping out of tight low-cut tops and triangle bikinis. They are the stars of reality TV, the “booze and boobs” set stalked by paparazzi with no other apparent talent than their figures and willingness to flaunt them (with the unexpected exception of Kourtney Kardashian who has been very vocal about her passion for breastfeeding, blogging about it and even pumping on camera, while maintaining her sexy, high-heeled image). And young girls dreaming of fame emulate them, seeing it is so much easier to get implants and garner a Twitter following than to actually learn how to act or sing or dance. Then years later, they are left with painful sagging scar tissue on their chests and a mothering experience that was not all it could have been.

I’m not denying breasts are sexual. On the contrary, breasts are and always have been highly sexual. I love mine, love having them touched, love how they look in the right clothes, love looking at other women’s. And so do men. My argument is that they have become oversexualized – when women routinely pay thousands to willingly be cut up and have foreign plastic matter inserted in their pecs, when people can’t wrap their heads around their dual functions of feeding and attraction – we are collectively past a tipping point into pathology.

It befuddles me exactly how and when this happened, but I have made it my mission to turn it around. A quick (and very unscientific) online survey targeted at men indicates that they love breasts in all shapes and sizes, and actually prefer real and small over large and fake. When asked about breastfeeding, only 5% of men described it as creepy while 67% acknowledged the dual function of breasts; 15% even said it turned them on. Men – to have your say, the survey is still open at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GQJHY25 .

Among all the op eds and comments resulting from Blundell’s piece, the other thing that really disturbs me is a terminal niceness and PC-ness around respecting each other’s choice. Half of the posts start with “Every women has a right to choose...”. That is true. Women in Western culture today have more choice and control over their individual lives than ever before – they can choose to marry or stay single, to work or not, to have an abortion or become a mother. Though we are far from reaching equality with men (if there is such a thing), many of the social stigmas and barriers faced by previous generations have evaporated. However, with the plethora of choice we enjoy comes the responsibility to choose wisely. Choosing to breastfeed is not only optimal for the individual mother and baby’s health – it also has ripple effects for the environment, for the economy, for the way we perceive our bodies. In the US, it is estimated that the government would save $13 billion (yes, that’s a “b”) in health care costs if every child was breastfed for the first six months of its life, and 900 less infants would die unnecessarily. Consider all the water, all the electricity for boiling, all the cartons going into landfills. Human milk is the ultimate green, a fact I don’t think the environmental community is touting enough. When you strip away the marketing and misperceptions, would there really be any other choice than to nurse?

Then we take it back down to the micro level of an individual mother, like Blundell, agonizing over how to feed her baby. Please understand I don’t judge any one person for their choice; everyone is a product of our culture that oversexualizes the breast and doesn’t provide the support or correct information to facilitate breastfeeding. But I do challenge this culture, and hope you will too.