The Big Letdown

by Kimberly Seals Allers

  This cultural obsession with breasts on the part of men and women alike is also very damaging to the promotion of breastfeeding. Campaigns that may help further normalize breastfeeding are often hindered by societal hang-ups about breasts. A few years ago, an organization commissioned clever breastfeeding posters for a public health campaign complete with photos of mothers with babies at their breasts. The posters said fun things like, “Fast food outlets. Two convenient locations” and “Sometimes it’s okay to suck up to the boss” but were deemed “offensive” and inappropriate for public display by local public health officials.

  Yet many public health campaigns for breast cancer awareness actually leverage the sexual nature of the breast, with campaigns like “Save the Ta-Tas.” The T-shirts had slogans like, “Caught you lookin’ at my ta-tas” and “I love my big ta-tas.” In Toronto, Canada, there’s an annual Booby Ball to benefit Rethinking Breast Cancer, which included a public service announcement that proclaimed, “You know you like them / now it’s time to save the boobs.” These campaigns, though well-intended, send the message that breast cancer is worthy of our attention because the breast is so desirable to men. And that if we stop breast cancer, then we protect women’s desirability and the male connection to the female body. All of these campaigns draw on a long-term sexualization of the breast and the association between femininity and the intact breast.

  You can also see this connection in the focus on breast reconstruction after a mastectomy. New breasts are often jokingly referred to as the “consolation prize” of breast cancer surgery, only furthering the breast-fixated perspective. It’s as if a woman can only be whole, complete, and sexy again if she has two full breasts. Way too much pink has been adorned to save breasts from disease or replace diseased breasts but little is done to help breasts perform their normal biological function—lactation. Both efforts often reduce women to their body parts without considering the whole woman. In both scenarios, breastfeeding and breast cancer, women often report feeling helpless and not in control of their bodies.

  Seeing breasts as sex objects also prevents us from having a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the breast. “Breasts are the only organ that does not have its own medical specialty, even though it is the most cancer ridden organ of our body, besides for skin,” says Florence Williams, a mother, science journalist, and author of the groundbreaking book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History.

  The damage of sexualizing breasts often falls squarely along racial lines. There’s a strong historical legacy of denigrating the bodies of African-American women. Not only do black women suffer from sexual objectification, but the ways in which they are objectified is linked to how they have been racially depicted as “exotic” and as “hypersexual.” During slavery, black women labored liked men but were also valued for their ability to “breed” and “feed,” enriching the stock of plantation owners by producing more slaves and benefiting the slave owner’s family by wet-nursing their babies. Historical records document that black women were often forced to stop breastfeeding their own children to nurse the children of the white slave owner. Black women’s breasts were examined and graded at slave auctions as if they were livestock. During the slavery era, their status as property meant that black women could legally not be raped, so the frequent sexual abuse by their white owners was passed off as licentious behavior on their own part. If the breast is sexualized, the totality of black women’s bodies has been hypersexualized. The fixation on the black breast became a legendary historical moment when Sojourner Truth, the six-foot-tall women’s rights and antislavery activist and former slave, most known for her impassioned and impromptu “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at a women’s convention in Ohio in 1851, was challenged on her femaleness. Truth, who had at least three of her children sold away from her while enslaved, was addressing a white audience that included a group of proslavery men. The men challenged her honor and questioned her claim to be a woman, demanding that she show her breast to the women in the audience. According to an article in The Liberator newspaper in 1838:

  Sojourner told them that her breasts has suckled many a white babe, to the exclusion of her own offspring; that some of those white babies had grown [and] … although they had suckled her colored breasts, they were, in her estimation, far more manly than they (her prosecutors) appeared to be; and she quietly asked them, as she disrobed her bosom, if they too wished to suck!… she told them that … it was not to her shame that she uncovered her breast before them, but to their shame.

  The unique controversy surrounding black women’s breasts goes back to a history of Africans being labeled as primitive, subhuman, and animal-like because they lived naturally in their native continent. This was twisted into a justification for the capture, enslavement, and oppression of Africans in America, who were deemed unworthy of humane treatment. Ever since then, the idea of whose breasts and bodies need to be controlled and which are valued has had racial implications. Today, breastfeeding is marketed as “natural,” which often backfires with black women because it negatively connotes stereotyping and subjugation.

  This continued politics around black women’s breasts became blatantly evident in the summer of 2014 when a friend of Karlesha Thurman, twenty-five, who just earned her accounting degree from California State University, posted a photo of Karlesha wearing her cap and gown and breastfeeding her three-month-old daughter while at graduation. The picture went viral, setting off an international media and social media firestorm. The headlines used words such as “provocative photo,” “fury erupts,” and “stirs controversy.” The negative and insulting comments Thurman received are too many and too vulgar to mention here. Thurman appeared on the Today show to address the unwanted attention and unexplainable cruelty. Four months later, a white Australian woman, Jacci Sharkey, sent a picture of herself also with her baby at her left breast, to the University of the Sunshine Coast as a thank-you for helping her graduate while juggling two children. The university found the photo so “amazing,” they posted it to their own Facebook page. Her picture, too, went viral, amassing over 275,000 likes and being shared more than nine thousand times. Buzzfeed ran the story of an “adorable” breastfeeding mom. These two very different reactions by the public and the media to a black woman and a white woman engaging in the exact same activity must be noted. The media referred to the white woman’s photo as “adorable” and held it up as proof that “women are the greatest.” If, indeed, all women’s bodies have been sexualized, black women’s bodies have been hypersexualized. And many times white women are able to overcome the sexualization. Only one of the two women was called “adorable” by the media and portrayed with girlish innocence, and it wasn’t the black one. These responses play into historical ideas of whose bodies need to be controlled and whose bodies are dangerous.

  Socioeconomics plays a part. Many studies have identified a significant correlation between low maternal education and the hypersexualization of breasts as a key barrier to breastfeeding. A study in Quebec, published in the September 2013 issue of Health & Place, found that middle-class women were more able to overcome the hypersexualization of the breast. As the study explored, these women have various sources of cultural capital, including more education, and share the value of scientific knowledge as it relates to parental practices. But low-income women may have less access to education and scientific knowledge as sources of cultural capital and may rely more heavily on the power of being viewed as attractive. Poor mothers lacked access to the power required to negotiate these barriers in their social space. “Women living in poverty tend to have less power via their total capital to challenge and negotiate the gaze of others when they engage in field of power of different public spaces,” the study authors wrote.

  “On the other hand, one source of social power they did have was physical attractiveness. In this paradigm, the perceived loss of physical attractiveness some low-income women associated with increased breastfeeding—believing it would dama
ge the shape and tone of the breasts—is a loss of social capital that they are not willing to risk. Our results suggest that poor mothers do not rely predominantly on scientific knowledge to guide their infant feeding decisions but tend to rely more on competing experiential knowledge of their family and peers, including the prototypical infant feeding experiences of their families,” the report concluded.

  This thinking is also seen on social media—a common go-to resource for breastfeeding support. For years, Facebook allowed videos of shootings and decapitations, but women were constantly being booted off Facebook when other users flagged their breastfeeding photos as indecent. By 2013, Facebook made an about-face, changing its community standards to say that it aspires “to respect people’s right to share content of personal importance, whether are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo’s David or family photos of a child breastfeeding.” However, the areola is the boundary for indecency. If it is visible, the image is verboten. The official announcement, posted under Facebook’s Community Standards reads: “We restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple, but we always allow photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring.”

  The truth is the breast is not inherently sexual. “There is an assumption that breasts are sexy and that they are sexual signals. But that wasn’t always the case,” said Florence Williams in an interview. However, Williams also notes that there’s no real historical evidence that breasts are universally considered sexy or that there is a particular size and shape that is universally desired. “In fact, there are many cultures and many times in our history where breasts just weren’t that big of a deal. The strange preoccupation with breasts as sex objects in the West is very unique. This is not universal,” she says. For much of human history, female and male breasts were treated the same. For centuries, women went topless in most parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Stroll through Europe, and there are countless statues of women’s bare breasts and women breastfeeding. They were the subject of many paintings and other beautiful artworks. As late as the fifteenth century, going topless wasn’t viewed as inappropriate since breasts were more associated with children and motherhood—not sex. But it was the spread of Christianity and missionary work in developing countries that changed the cultural norms, equating toplessness with uncivilized and ungodly behavior.

  So breasts went undercover. But the fact they were covered created more mystery, curiosity, and schoolboyish, Monty Python–like behavior. Keeping breasts in the dirty and taboo pool has its own set of consequences. It’s ironic that covering breasts up has likely done more to sexualize them than when they were exposed. New cottage industries have been created and billions have been made and paid in the quest to see an uncovered female breast. Web sites feature popular and extensive photo galleries of celebrity boob shots, “nip slip” moments, side boobage, awkward moments getting out of cars, and other costume slippages. Some young actresses anxious to prolong their celebrity sometimes intentionally dress to qualify for these boob-obsessed and highly trafficked series. At the 85th annual Academy Awards in 2013, comedian and host Seth MacFarlane opened the show with the song, “We Saw Your Boobs,” in which he rattled off famous actresses and the movies in which they disrobed. The Oscar host mentioned actresses like Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart, Kate Winslet, and Jodie Foster. Some saw it as a classic satire of an industry obsessed with breasts; others took offense. Our breast obsession is beyond schoolboyish, it’s downright embarrassing. And it allows viewers to happily forget the primary function of breasts and focus solely on the sexual one.

  Interestingly, at one point, the male nipple was also sexualized and banned from public view. But men fought back, protesting and going topless until the culture changed. The revolution ignited in 1930 when four guys were arrested in Coney Island for going shirtless on a beach. Then Hollywood icon Clark Gable stripped off his shirt in It Happened One Night, marking the scandalous debut of a man’s uncensored nipples in American cinema. In 1935 New Jersey hit back with a mass arrest of forty-two topless men in Atlantic City. After years of protest and outrage, New York lifted the male topless ban in 1936, and suddenly a man’s nipples were no longer “obscene” in society but, rather, commonplace and natural.

  What about women? In 2015 the Free the Nipple movie and social media campaign were launched all over the world. Women went topless in the streets to protest the hypocrisy of men’s ability to bare their nipples when women were disallowed from doing so. On social media, the hashtag #FreeTheNipple trended for days as celebrities such as Miley Cyrus bared their breasts in Twitter pics in solidarity. Scout Willis, the daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, walked around New York City topless to highlight the inequality of women’s bodies. Women recognized the captivity of the nipple as symptomatic of the continued objectification of women’s bodies. Momentum is building, but the nipple is not yet free. Can the breast ever be moved out of the sexual category and therefore freed to feed babies? It’s hard to see how.

  Then there’s the men—the partners or husbands who are clearly inextricably involved in the breastfeeding equation. Any analysis of the forces influencing breastfeeding must include the men, who historically have owned women and their bodies. They have contributed to the problem but also may be part of the solution. In the old days, the marriage contract was used to grant men the right of sexual access and ownership. Expressions like, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” still show that sexual access should be limited and withheld until “ownership”—that is, marriage. When women’s bodies belong to men, that includes the breast. A man’s claims to the breast come in direct conflict with a child’s needs, and women are stuck in the middle. Women are often uncomfortable nursing in public because of the anticipation of a male gaze. In some neighborhoods, the idea of nursing in public and bringing unwanted male attention to your breasts is a safety issue. In other cultures, men oppose breastfeeding because of their fears of other men looking at their wife in a sexual way. Some breastfeeding or infant formula ads support the male-gaze viewpoint, showing a man watching his wife breastfeed. Your assumption is that his focus is on the child. But he may be thinking, “Hey kid, when am I going to get that back?”

  Perhaps the greatest consequence of the breast as a sex object is that it prevents us from talking about the many ways breastfeeding feels good. Yes, breastfeeding is pleasurable. That is not conjecture; that is biology. The suckling of an infant produces the release of the pleasure-inducing hormones prolactin and oxytocin—the same ones released during orgasm. It is also released in large amounts during labor. During breastfeeding, the oxytocin is responsible for the milk-ejection reflex, known as the “letdown.” Oxytocin’s documented effect on calmness and well-being have earned it the nicknames the “cuddle chemical,” the “bonding hormone,” and the “love hormone.” But conflating breasts with sexuality and sensuality and the idea that an infant can produce the same biological response as a man is too much for the male psyche and patriarchal structures to handle. Perhaps this is one area where the La Leche League had it right. A 1992 member magazine nailed it when it said, “the human race would not have survived if breastfeeding was not enjoyable for mothers.”

  Mothers daring to speak of the pleasure of breastfeeding have faced serious repercussions. Take the example of Denise Perrigo, a white single mother of one, who in January 1991 was arrested on charges of sexually abusing her child and had her two-year-old taken away from her and put into foster care for a year. The charge was “mouth to breast contact.” Perrigo practiced extended breastfeeding. One day while nursing her daughter, Perrigo experienced a “sexual kind of feeling,” she said. Alarmed by this, she called a local community volunteer center and asked to be put in touch with the local La Leche League office. But when the volunteers heard “sexual arousal,” they directed Perrigo to the rape counsel center instead of La Leche League. The counselor at the center heard Perrigo’s story and deemed it “
child sexual abuse.” She said that, because a child was involved, she needed to get her supervisor on the phone, but had already told the supervisor that it was a case of child abuse. While on the phone, the supervisor asked questions that fit her preconceived ideas. For example, she asked Perrigo where her daughter was right then. Perrigo responded that she was in her bed. Although Perrigo was in another room on the phone to the supervisor while her daughter was in her bed, the supervisor wrote down that Perrigo was in bed with her daughter.

  While she was on the phone arguing with the supervisor, the supervisor contacted the rape crisis “hotline,” which sent the local police to arrest Perrigo. Press coverage cast Perrigo as a victim of the “national hysteria” over incest. La Leche League assisted Perrigo by providing expert testimony and lawyer referrals, as well as local leaders’ emotional support. The criminal charges were eventually dropped, but social services filed charges of sexual abuse and neglect, and Perrigo was allowed only biweekly supervised visits with her daughter during an almost one-year separation.

  The message was clear: breastfeeding is not meant to be a pleasurable experience. And if you experience pleasure, you dare not speak of it. In fact, some La Leche League materials advised never confiding in unfamiliar professionals, especially when extended breastfeeding, who may interpret it as “pathological.” To make sure women were not demonized for the actual biology of their bodies, breastfeeding became hypersterilized over the years and idealized in order to separate it from the sexual breast.

  There is no doubt in my mind that breastfeeding is pleasurable. Yes, the early days can be awkward and uncomfortable, but after you get the rhythm, something else happens. I remember how, after a long day at work, there was nothing more relaxing and comforting than to lie down and enjoy a slow nursing session with my son. The tingling sensation of the letdown was followed by a very calming feeling. That sensation feels good. I’m not sure if it ever felt sexual for me, but it was certainly sensual, in some way. But we don’t talk about that because breastfeeding has been culturally redefined as an asexual experience. That redefinition was related to women’s oppression and our desexualization as maternal beings—our inability to be fully expressed as both sexual beings and maternal beings. So we focus on the medical benefits and not the pleasurable feelings of breastfeeding because we are afraid of societal taboos of an already hypersexualized breast. If only Perrigo had known that her feelings were normal, not deviant, perhaps she would not have made that fateful call. Instead of the pleasure of breastfeeding, pain is assigned to the experience with an infant, saving pleasure for the male or sexual role. We have been told that any sensual feelings must come from a man or lover and that anything else is wrong. That turns any pleasurable feelings while breastfeeding into pathology or a source of shame for women. There is no safe place for a mother to enjoy breastfeeding and experience it in a way that counters the dominant narrative.