I was reading the Salon article “How a topless beach helped my self-esteem” and then the subsequent comments on Jezebel. What surprised me is that nobody seems to have made the correlation between this woman’s desire for male attention on her breasts (she even made it clear that she was going topless to validate her new breasts through the male gaze) and the constant arguments about breastfeeding in public and how some people are really uncomfortable when seeing a woman breastfeed.
Some things that are missing in the article: when the French said that it’s natural and she was being self conscious about it, they were right. She missed the point entirely. I had never seen so much public nudity until I moved to The Netherlands. In parks, beaches, in the middle of the city, women of all ages and shapes sunbathe topless in public. And it is not sexual. Saunas are mixed gender and again, everyone goes nude. The only time I saw a topless woman being harassed it was by a bunch of foreigners (I never knew of what nationality but they spoke what sounded like some Slavic language). The Salon writer brought her own cultural baggage to an environment where that cultural baggage was obviously out of place.
So that brings me to the breastfeeding in public. Here, in Northern Europe (and I won’t speak for all of Europe because it’s a pretty diverse continent), people are more accustomed to seeing breasts in different contexts. Bare breasts on the beach, bare breasts in the park, bare breasts while having some kind of sexual encounter, bare breasts breastfeeding. And that diversity of contexts has probably contributed to the fact that, a woman baring breasts in public to feed a baby is a non issue. Something that nobody would bat an eye over.
Probably that’s why I take issue when told that breasts are purely mammary glands (as I was a couple of days ago) because that’s not true. It’s probably the one part of the female anatomy where context and intent matter.
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