Breastfeeding Social Experiment: Sexy vs. Breastfeeding
Video shows how hypocritical some people are regarding breastfeeding in public
Last week, Joey Salads, the self-proclaimed prankster and viral video maker, turned his attention to a wildly different topic than he usually addresses: the harassment women still face when trying to breastfeed a child in public. He made a breastfeeding “social experiment” that was viewed over 15 million times. In it, Salads accompanies a breastfeeding mother to various public places to see how people react to her publicly feeding her child.
It doesn’t go well. It’s amazing how many people still have a problem with women breastfeeding in public, and feel it’s their right to be vocal in their opposition. The woman in the video is confronted several times by people chiding her for feeding her child in a public space.
This week, Salads decided to try a different approach to see the ways people react to other women who show a lot of breast in public — that’s the issue, right? People don’t think it’s appropriate to whip out the boob? That’s usually the argument that’s made when women are told they should find some place “private” to breastfeed. But the argument is stupid and all breastfeeding women know it. Because women walk around showing cleavage all the time and don’t get the outraged responses breastfeeding mothers do.
Watch this.
We live in a culture that glorifies the female body, but only when it’s sexualized, thin enough, young enough – and displayed for the titillation of men. Oh, and we don’t like nipples. Giant boobs are okay – just no nipples. A two-second nipple slip on a breastfeeding woman is enough to make some people lose their minds.
“That’s disgusting,” several people say as they walk by the woman breastfeeding in the video. If it weren’t for internet threads filled with comments that said the same every time an article about public breastfeeding appeared online, I’d think this video were scripted. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who really feel this way: that a woman breastfeeding her child in public is inappropriate and “disgusting.” Yet these same people have no problems with boobs in any other capacity.
If you are bothered by the site of a woman feeding her child – the most natural thing in the world – just keep it to yourself. Or get some therapy. Or both. There are a lot of problems in this world, but nipples didn’t cause any of them.
Get a grip.
