What Do You Think of TIME‘s Breastfeeding Cover?

[EnderD_503]

Originally Posted by Scuba

Funny how SOCIETY sexualizes/objectifies and shames women all in the same sentence.

I am SO over the patriarch and it's ignorant agenda that I just cringe anymore when articles like this are published. It's high time some people just get over themselves and grow up.

Originally Posted by The_Lady_Snow

What I will NEVER understand is why people have to sexualize, pervert, be so crude regarding a mother and her child and their choice.

I haven't read the article (I don't read Time magazine, but I'll see if it's on their website), but I agree very much with these two statements. When it comes to breastfeeding North American society seems to have this uncanny desire to try to sexually objectify and shame women, and portray breastfeeding as some kind of kinky activity between mother and child with an invisible hetero cismale spectator.

At the same time, the cover makes me wonder about the intentions behind designing the cover. I don't know, but something about the way the bodies are posed seems like the cover is purposefully trying to sexually objectify/shame/pervert breastfeeding. Maybe if I read the article more would be clarified, but it makes me wonder if that is typically how the mother in the article breastfeeds her child, if this is a natural pose, or if it was staged that way for a purpose. And if their bodies were posed/staged, then that does disturb me. Not because of the act of breastfeeding itself, but because it then becomes another example of sexualising women's bodies in the media for the purpose of attracting the hetero cismale gaze. So instead of talking women's relationships with their children and the social stigmas against breastfeeding, we're back to a conversation with the hetero male spectre in the background...