Friday, July 28, 2006


Rant !!!


This is an article from ABCNews.com - my thoughts are plopped in, in various places, bolded and in parentheses....


'Breast' Cover Gets Mixed Reaction

"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.

(Shocked to see a breast? Is this person living in the same country as I am???
Turned the magazine face down? Gross? What? Are these people SERIOUS? Have they seen what is at the checkout line at the grocery store lately?? Half naked people everywhere!! WTF??)


These readers weren't complaining about a sexually explicit cover, but rather one of a baby nursing, on a wholesome parenting magazine yet another sign that Americans are squeamish over the sight of a nursing breast, even as breast-feeding itself gains more support from the government and medical community.
(Sad. Very very sad...)

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.
(Maybe so, its all a matter of personal opinion. Some people just don't wanna see boobie. I can live with that. But to call it gross? Gross? Gross is seeing someone throw up, or stepping in dog shit..not breastfeeding a child...)

One mother who didn't like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it. (She should not take him to the Mall. Those Victoria Secret Ads get larger and larger every time I am in there. At our mall, they have MURALS..they take up WHOLE walls. Half naked women everywhere..Oh and dont forget about all those Calvin Klein ads and Abercrombie ads in the mall too, that have enough innuendo to satisfy that creep behind that large planter over there in the corner!!)

"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."
(No, you dumb ass, a breast is a BREAST. Unfortunately we live in a stupid, fucked up society that makes EVERYTHING sexual. You cannot even see a commercial for TIRES for your car without it being sexualized. It is pathetic...)

It's the same reason that Ash, 41, who nursed all three of her children, is cautious about breast-feeding in public a subject of enormous debate among women, which has even spawned a new term: "lactivists," meaning those who advocate for a woman's right to nurse wherever she needs to.

"I'm totally supportive of it I just don't like the flashing," she says. "I don't want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn't want to see."
(This one sent water spraying out of my nose. You show me ONE son or ONE husband that DOESN'T want to see a breast at any turn. Just one!! They may SAY they don't want to see it, but we all know they are full of SHIT.)

Another mother, Kelly Wheatley, wrote Babytalk to applaud the cover, precisely because, she says, it helps educate people that breasts are more than sex objects. And yet Wheatley, 40, who's still nursing her 3-year-old daughter, rarely breast-feeds in public, partly because it's more comfortable in the car, and partly because her husband is uncomfortable with other men seeing her breast.

(People NEED to be educated on this. However, feeding your 3 year old, IS CREEPY. LOL. See previous post!)


"Men are very visual," says Wheatley, 40, of Amarillo, Texas. "When they see a woman's breast, they see a breast regardless of what it's being used for."
(RIGHT! But it isn't the MEN who are complaining about the magazine cover!!)


Babytalk editor Susan Kane says the mixed response to the cover clearly echoes the larger debate over breast-feeding in public. "There's a huge Puritanical streak in Americans," she says, "and there's a squeamishness about seeing a body part even part of a body part."
(What? Dude, even the Amish folk aren't Puritanical anymore. Give me a BREAK!)

"It's not like women are whipping them out with tassels on them!" she adds. "Mostly, they are trying to be discreet."
(Nah. We leave that tassel shit to Madonna....)

Kane says that since the August issue came out last week, the magazine has received more than 700 letters more than for any article in years.

"Gross, I am sick of seeing a baby attached to a boob," wrote Lauren, a mother of a 4-month-old.
( I am sick of seeing Paris Hiltons skanky mug all over the place too. NEWSFLASH! Don't buy/read that issue then, you ass!)

The evidence of public discomfort isn't just anecdotal. In a survey published in 2004 by the American Dietetic Association, less than half 43 percent of 3,719 respondents said women should have the right to breast-feed in public places.

The debate rages at a time when the celebrity-mom phenomenon has made breast-feeding perhaps more public than ever. Gwyneth Paltrow, Brooke Shields, Kate Hudson and Kate Beckinsale are only a few of the stars who've talked openly about their nursing experiences.

The celeb factor has even brought a measure of chic to that unsexiest of garments: the nursing bra. Gwen Stefani can be seen on babyrazzi.com a site with a self-explanatory name sporting a leopard-print version from lingerie line Agent Provocateur. And fellow moms recognized a white one under Angelina Jolie's tank top on the cover of People. (Katie Holmes, meanwhile, suffered a maternity wardrobe malfunction when cameras caught her, nursing bra open and peeking out of her shirt, while on the town with fiance Tom Cruise.)

(You can bet your ASS that if people found out that the boob on the cover of that magazine belonged to Angelina, magazine sales would SHOOT through the roof! Zang!!)

More seriously, the social and medical debate has intensified. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently concluded a two-year breast-feeding awareness campaign including a TV ad criticized as over-the-top even by some breast-feeding advocates in which NOT breast-feeding was equated with the recklessness of a pregnant woman riding a mechanical bull.
(Um, yeah, that's a little much.)


There have been other measures to promote breast-feeding: in December, for example, Massachusetts banned hospitals from giving new mothers gift bags with free infant formula, a practice opponents said swayed some women away from nursing.
(People still should have the choice. Here is another case of the government butting in where they should not...)

Most states now have laws guaranteeing the right to breast-feed where one chooses, and when a store or restaurant employee denies a woman that right, it has often resulted in public protests known as "nurse-ins": at a Starbucks in Miami, at Victoria's Secret stores in Racine, Wis., and Boston, and, last year, outside ABC headquarters in New York, when Barbara Walters made comments on "The View" seen by some women to denigrate breast-feeding in public.

"It's a new age," says Melinda Johnson, a registered dietitian and spokesperson for ADA. "With the government really getting behind breast-feeding, it's been a jumping-off point for mothers to be politically active. Mommies are organizing. It's a new trend to be a mommy activist."
( I am all for generating awareness, but some people just take it too far...)

Ultimately, it seems to be a highly personal matter. Caly Wood says she's "all for breast-feeding in public." She recalls with a shudder the time she sat nursing in a restaurant booth, and another woman walked by, glanced over and said, "Ugh, gross."

"My kid needed to eat," says the 29-year-old from South Abingdon, Mass. And she wasn't going to go hide in a not-so-clean restroom: "I don't send people to the bathroom when THEY want to eat," she says.

But Rebekah Kreutz thinks differently. One of six women who author SisterhoodSix, a blog on mothering issues, Kreutz didn't nurse her two daughters in public, and doesn't really feel comfortable seeing others do it.

"I respect it and think women have the right," says Kreutz, 34, of Bozeman, Mont. "But personally, it makes me really uncomfortable."
(Personally, YOU MAKE ME UNCOMFORTABLE....)

"I just think it's one of those moments that should stay between a mother and her child."
(That is fine. But why should the rest of the world conform to what YOU think?? )

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
(oops!!)

Comments:
This is all just silly. I subscribe to this magazine; I have the issue that is being criticized. My husband is probably one of the shyest men you'll ever find when it comes to seeing other women's girly parts. He refused to look at two extremely drunk girls stripping at a bar when we went to Cancun...I tried to get him to look b/c it was SO funny, and he refused to look at the boobies at the beach when we were in Dominican Republic (many go topless there, even the old saggy ones...it just makes him really uncomfortable. Sometimes seeing women nursing in public makes him uncomfortable. That said, he saw this cover when we first received it in the mail a few days ago, and I just asked him what he thought about it and he didn't even remember it. Sooooo...I'm shocked that all these people were so grossed out by it. If it were "gross" then he would remember it.

I don't nurse in public. Like Stellina said, your other boob often leaks when your nursing. Plus, if the baby lets go during the first five minutes or so then you've got basically a breastmilk firehose spraying everywhere out of the end of your breast. It's a mess. I choose to do it in the car, or if you go to the mall you can use dressing rooms. I'm all for nursing in public if people can figure out how to do it discreetly so that everyone feels at ease.
 
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