Everyone Wants to See Your Breasts—Until Your Baby Needs Them
Lisa Moricoli Latham / FALL 2002
FROM EARLIEST PUBERTY, A WOMAN MUST FACE THE PUBLIC nature of two of her most personal body parts. Trading in her cotton undershirt for a training bra is only the beginning: Between strap-snapping classmates, sadistic bra salesladies who insist on leaving the fitting-room door ajar, and relatives who chuckle over how she’s grown, the first growing pain is the start of a lifelong push-and-pull between the public and the private appearance of a woman’s breasts. From then on, cleavage depth, shirt transparency, bra-strap show-through, and nipple outlines are a daily concern—and that’s not even getting into the unsolicited daily commentary a woman’s breasts receive on the street, on the bus, and at the office.
But when the advent of motherhood transforms a woman’s breasts once again, she is caught in an even deeper and more troubling conflict between the private and the public breast. From
Playboy
to the St. Pauli Girl, American culture declares that while breasts as a signifier of available sexuality should be flaunted, breasts doing the job nature assigned them are taboo. Right when a woman needs her breasts the most, she’s told to cover up and move on.
The antagonism between the sexual and the working breast arises almost as soon as a woman discovers that she’s pregnant. Publicly apparent changes such as substantial—even alarming—breast growth early in pregnancy increase the visual allure of breasts while, at the same time, private changes
like tenderness and pain significantly decrease their actual potential to offer sexual pleasure to their owner.
In a culture where men on the street feel free to comment on the ta-tas of otherwise anonymous passersby, it follows that friends and relatives of a pregnant woman are unlikely to hold their peace when new developments occur on her chest. Nearly every mother I know has gotten a repeat dose of adolescent embarrassment early in her pregnancy with remarks like “My, how you’ve grown (again)!” which pretend to approve even as they seek to humiliate. Even more annoying are winking variations on “Your husband must be thrilled,” which are not merely impolite but reinforce the idea that a woman’s breasts are somehow not her own.
Once her baby is born, a mother’s rack becomes even less private. Strangers are prone to asking whether she’s bottle- or breastfeeding her newborn. Breastfeeding puts a mother’s breasts out in public even more, because sooner or later, she’ll need to feed her baby around other people. And while Americans gladly tolerate extensive sexual displays of cleavage, we demand that nursing breasts stay completely hidden—an impossible task, especially for the mother new to nursing, given the sometimes gymnastic efforts she must undertake to teach a newborn to latch on properly. Trying to cover herself while struggling with a squirming, wobbly-necked neonate can be like fighting a cat inside a tent: not pretty, and liable to cause injury.
In
A History of the Breast
, the definitive source on all things mammarian, the historian Marilyn Yalom points out that even in notoriously buttoned-up Victorian times, women could breastfeed in church without notice or comment; these days, the merest sliver of lactating nipple can be less welcome than a public nosepicking. A baby’s fumble to latch on can inspire friends and relatives to leap up and shield a nursing mother with coats and tablecloths, like she’s an adolescent changing clothes at the beach. That this comic spectacle is supposedly less embarrassing than the possibility that someone might glimpse a patch of flesh somewhere beneath the folds of a lifted blouse indicates that a normalized working breast is far, far off.
Even television, our great cultural leveler, has only recently begun to explore the conflict between the sexual and the working breast—and it always seems to be resolved in favor of the sexual. HBO’s woman-centric touchstone
Sex and the City
found itself in a position of judgment when lead
character Miranda had a baby. In one episode, Carrie spies Miranda’s breasts as she tries in vain to nurse her newborn son. Carrie is visibly disturbed and looks everywhere but at the offending appendages before blurting out, “Oh my God, your breasts are
huge
!” She then admits with more than a hint of disgust that she was “totally unprepared” for the size of Miranda’s nursing nipples and adds that she’ll “have to find some sort of trauma counseling” to deal with the impact. For a character who checks men out head-to-toe in the show’s title sequence, Carrie’s reaction to a good friend’s breastfeeding is a powerful demonstration of the shock—and indeed, betrayal—many feel when confronted with a working breast instead of the sexual one we’re expecting.
Carrie’s seemingly disproportionate discomfort mirrors that of our culture at large: Because we are so used to thinking of breasts as sexual, we are unable to conceive of anything breast-related as truly free from sexual overtones. Thus, puritanical disapproval becomes extreme when we are confronted with breasts in what can be argued is their most natural, decidedly nonsexual state. Nursing mothers are routinely kicked out of public places, harassed into covering up, and generally looked upon as deviants bent on an exhibitionist thrill, rather than mothers simply trying to feed their offspring. Publicly nursing a toddler or a preschooler is likely to subject a mother to accusations of child abuse. Even women who joyfully nursed babies will admonish, “When he’s old enough to ask for it by name, he’s too old to nurse,” as if the comfort value of suckling (not to mention its continued immunological benefits) were confined to the preverbal child. Because toddlers can be nourished by other food, the logic goes, they should be, because any use of the breast beyond what’s absolutely necessary must have a dubious sexual element.
Indeed, exposing the public to a nursing mother has become tantamount to exposing the public to sex. Lawyer Nancy Solomon, of the California Women’s Law Center (CWLC), has represented nursing mothers who were told to stop breastfeeding in parks because “children might see” (never mind that a child was the one doing the nursing). In 1999, a Los Angeles woman sued Borders when she was kicked out of the chain store for nursing her baby. In June 2002, seventy mothers gathered for a nurse-in at the Santa Monica Place mall after a woman was harassed by a security guard for nursing.
The 1999 Right to Breastfeed Act, which guarantees a woman’s right to breastfeed on federal property, was precipitated by several complaints about the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Although the gallery reverently houses paintings of the Madonna nursing the Christ child, several women were kicked out for nursing actual babies—an appropriate illustration of America’s simultaneous veneration of and contempt for mothers’ roles.
States still have their own policies on breastfeeding in public places, though, and it can make for some bizarre demonstrations of the either/or nature of the sexual and working breast. In one of CWLC’s particularly galling cases, a patron at a restaurant in Las Vegas—a city whose nude revues make it the undisputed champion of the visible breast—was informed by the management (incorrectly, by the way) that breastfeeding a baby at the table constituted a health-code violation.
The cognitive disjunction between the sexual breast and the working breast amounts to a vicious circle: Without more acceptance of nursing breasts as normal and necessary, acceptably decorative breasts are ever more divorced from the reality of their nonsexual functions, and working mammaries remain, in public perception, stubbornly sexual and therefore not fit for the literal public consumption babies demand. CWLC’s Solomon, who makes regular media appearances on breastfeeding issues, recalls appearing on a Los Angeles radio station discussing a nurse-in she helped coordinate. Callers’ reactions to nursing in public varied, but one man’s opinion—“If she were hot, it’d be okay”—showed a loud-and-clear tolerance for nursing only as long as it also carries sexual gratification for the witness.
Motherhood itself, however, is considered beyond sex, if not actually antisex; mothers and breasts must not be associated if breasts are to retain their ability to arouse. Coincident with a new mother’s sudden, purely practical need of her breasts, our culture desexualizes her. (Just try, for instance, to find a sexy nursing bra in a marketplace that only recently began offering them in the most opaque black cotton.)
With all the breasts used to sell out there, it’s also notable how few belong to pregnant or nursing mothers. The fact that maternal breasts don’t have the kind of immediately understood currency of, say, those of a teenage model means that Americans can go their entire lives without seeing
pregnant, nursing, or postchildbearing breasts depicted as either beautiful or sexual (for adults, not children)—and that does a disservice to the full spectrum of meaning contained in women’s roles.
The problem is not the dual nature of our breasts but a cultural unwillingness to understand or accept that this nature is fluid. Men who ogle breasts on the street and grandparents who object to public nursing represent two sides of the same coin: Both confine breasts in public to the realm of sexuality and tolerate no alternatives. If more American women face down these naysayers and adjust the exclusivity of that confinement, who knows where the social advantages might end. Nursing bras that acknowledge that mothers don’t lose their libido when they gain an offspring are a step in the right direction; more widespread respect for the reduced cancer rates and lower incidence of childhood ear infections that result from increased breastfeeding would be even more so. But the understanding that working breasts and their bearer’s sexuality are decidedly separate yet need not be mutually exclusive, and the understanding that a woman’s breasts in public are nobody’s business but her own—and sometimes her baby’s—will benefit all women, from pubescent girls to mothers of five, whether they choose to keep their breasts public, private, or a little of both.
What’s Up with the Mainstreaming of Gay Parents?
Margaret Price / FALL 2003
FIVE YEARS AGO, I WROTE AN INDIGNANT LETTER TO THE NEW York Times Magazine because it had just published a special issue on motherhood and had failed to include any representations of queer moms. Surely, I argued, in an entire issue they could have found space for just one nonstraight mom. Well, be careful what you wish for.
Now queer parents are all over the media: Custody disputes in Florida. Adoption documentaries on PBS and Cinemax. Smiling, sweaty dykes giving birth on
Friends and Queer As Folk
. And with the recent progress toward the legalization of gay marriage, we can expect even more queering of the crib in the months and years to come.
This surge of attention to queer parents mirrors a rise in actual numbers. According to the nonprofit Adoption Family Center, in 1976 there were only about five hundred thousand biological children of gay and lesbian parents. But by 2002, as noted by Suzanne Johnson and Elizabeth O’Connor in
The Gay Baby Boom: The Psychology of Gay Parenthood
, as many as fourteen million kids (biological, foster, and adoptive) have at least one gay or lesbian parent. In a 2001
Washington Post
article headlined “Lesbians Find Haven in Suburbs,” David Elliott of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force says proudly, “We are indeed everywhere.”
But who is this “we,” and how are we represented? If you refer to available media images of queer parents, what do you see? I’ve spent the last
couple of months reading magazines, searching the web, and watching innumerable episodes of
Queer As Folk
on DVD. And from where I sit, it seems that queer parents—in both fictional and nonfictional representations—are an awfully Brady-like bunch. They’re predominantly white, middle- or upper-class, and partnered; moreover, they usually don’t push boundaries of gender or sexuality. For example, a
Washington Post
article headlined “Lesbians Find Haven in Suburbs” eagerly documents the ways one pair of lesbians are discovering their inner soccer moms: “They’re active in the PTA of their daughter’s school. They drive a minivan and help at block parties. Neighborhood children flock to the huge trampoline in their backyard.” Now, there’s nothing diabolical about helping at block parties or having a trampoline, but the real point of the article seems to be to underscore what these moms are not doing: namely, shaking things up.
Queer parents tend to be portrayed in ways that play up their normativity. “We’re just like you” is the rallying cry—or, depending upon who’s producing the images, “They’re just like us.” Author and columnist Dan Savage, who adopted a son with his partner, Terry, has commented on the pressure that’s placed on queer parents to seem as uncontroversial as possible. “Some [gays and lesbians] felt that Terry and I—young, urban types—weren’t the ‘right’ kind of gay couple to be adopting,” he explained in an online interview with ABC News. “They felt that, due to the political controversy surrounding gay men and lesbians adopting, that older, ‘safer,’ cozier gay couples should adopt.” Although in that interview Savage didn’t elaborate on what “safer” and “cozier” might mean, he does say more in his 1999 book,
The Kid
, which details his and Terry’s experience. One objection came from a queer activist who argued, in Savage’s words, that gay adoptive parents should be “men in their forties, together at least eight years, monogamous, professional, irreproachable, and unassailable.” Dan and Terry failed to meet the specs of this hypervirtuous profile on a number of counts, particularly given Savage’s career as a sex columnist. Writing about bondage and anal fisting, apparently, does not mix with parenting. Or isn’t supposed to.
This conflict is familiar to many groups battling for civil rights: Is the best strategy to assimilate with mainstream culture, or to try to radicalize it? Often, the urge is to downplay difference and therefore avoid conflict. But the fact is, queer parenting is itself a paradox. It’s both conventional and
radical, a gesture toward joining mainstream culture and a way to transform it. The 2002 documentary
Daddy & Papa
sums up this perspective in the voice of Johnny, a gay man who adopts two sons with his partner: “My most revolutionary act would be the most traditional thing in the world.”
Most media representations of queer parents eschew this paradox and emphasize the seemliness of their subjects. It’s almost as if, having decided to focus on one freak factor, those shaping the stories feel compelled to keep everything else (race, class, gender, family structure, sexual practices) as bland and unremarkable as possible.
The parents in the Lifetime movie
What Makes a Family
, HBO’s dyke drama
If These Walls Could Talk 2
, Showtime’s
Queer As Folk
, the ubiquitous
Friends
, and the Cinemax documentary
He’s Having a Baby
are, for instance, overwhelmingly Caucasian. And the problem goes beyond quantity and into quality: Most portrayals of queer parents not only underrepresent parents of color, they downplay the ways that race can complicate the lives and choices of queer parents and their kids. This deficiency is unnervingly apparent throughout the documentary
He’s Having a Baby
, which follows a white father, Jeff Danis, as he adopts a Vietnamese son. Danis decides early in the film that he wants to adopt a child from abroad but fails to make a peep about the issues inherent in cross-cultural and cross-racial adoption. Instead, his concerns are shown to be shallow to the point of absurdity. To wit: “The pictures of kids from China and Guatemala were very cute,” Danis reports, “but the one from Cambodia, the kid wasn’t that cute. So I’m like, Oh, God, what if I don’t get a cute kid? He has to be a cute kid. Or at least kind of cute. He can’t be ugly. I can’t have an ugly kid.”
Then there’s the third segment of HBO’s
If These Walls Could Talk 2
, which stars Ellen DeGeneres and Sharon Stone as Kal and Fran, two Southern California dykes with a pronounced case of baby fever. The most bizarre moment in this short film comes when Fran proposes to Kal, “Maybe we should think about having an ethnic baby. Ethnic babies are so beautiful.” It’s hard to discern the purpose of this racist comment. Is it meant unproblematically? Or perhaps to show that queer adoptive parents are susceptible to the same foibles as straight ones? Hard to say; the issue is not discussed any further.
Apart from being overwhelmingly white, most pop culture queer parents are extraordinarily well-off. Neither Fran nor Kal, for example, appears
to be employed. However, they live in a large, well-appointed house, drive an SUV, and apparently have no concerns about undertaking a project whose dollar-suckage per month will run them somewhere between a car payment and a mortgage. Sitting in their kitchen next to a brushed-aluminum refrigerator, among yards of glowing blonde-wood cabinetry, they get on the phone with a sperm bank. Kal’s end of the conversation goes like this: “We want it. Yes. We want it. All of it! All of it! How much is it? Wow. Okay, whatever.” Just to put this dialogue in perspective, sperm banks charge between $150 and $300 for a single vial. Apparently, these dykes are in a position to order thousands of dollars’ worth of jizz without thinking twice about it.
The narrative struggle of the film focuses solely upon whether Fran and Kal are able—biologically—to get pregnant. Although they’re shown making multiple attempts, expressing frustration at their lack of success, and finally stepping up their efforts by visiting a fertility specialist, all of this is untrammeled by financial constraints. The audience can cheer wholeheartedly for them without having to consider difficult questions such as: Do Fran and Kal have health insurance? Can one of them cover the other through domestic partnership? Does their policy have implicit penalties for using donor sperm (for instance, a required twelve-month waiting period in which they must try to get pregnant before any coverage kicks in)? What options are open to the gals if they can’t afford that nice fertility specialist—or the sperm from the sperm bank in the first place? How much does second-party adoption cost, and is it even legal in the state where they live? What safeguards can they put in place if Kal can’t adopt Fran’s baby, and how much would the legal fees for those safeguards run?
Admittedly,
Walls 2
would be as dull as dirt if it addressed every one of those questions. But the film avoids the topic of money to such an extreme that Fran and Kal seem to exist in a sunny, airbrushed paradise where tanks of frozen sperm, helpful medical professionals, and surgical procedures simply appear for the taking. And this omission, in turn, allows the heterosexist policies and laws that are built into our medical and legal systems to go unnoticed.
On the nonfiction side,
He’s Having a Baby
once again disappoints. Potential dad Jeff Danis, who is “gay, nearing 50,” is a Hollywood (do I sense a pattern?) talent agent who has discovered a sudden longing to have a
child. The opening scenes of the film are taken up with luscious shots of his home, which includes an in-ground swimming pool, abstract sculptures, and enough square footage of hardwood floor to play roller hockey. Much of the film’s action takes place in his BMW, from which he conducts impatient, agenty conversations on the phone while driving from adoption interview to adoption interview. A later sequence shows his partner, Don, mulling over the idea of having a child. It’s hard to tell whether the directors meant this montage cynically or not, but it’s framed as a series of pensive shots of Don and Jeff on vacation, each with a subtitle to identify the posh locale: Saint Barts. Palm Springs. The Hamptons. Big Sur. When Jeff eventually gets on the telephone to inform the adoption agency which of two Vietnamese orphans he wants, the conversation sounds disturbingly as if he is purchasing a piece of real estate: “I’m going to go for Lam Xuan Chinh … Karen, thanks so much, I’ll be back in touch with you real soon. Let’s put a hold on Lam Xuan Chinh.”
Child-as-property vibe aside, these representations of free-spending queer parents are problematic in that they simply don’t mention the issue that is uppermost in so many would-be parents’ minds: How the fuck am I going to afford this? When parents get pregnant for free (i.e., sperm meets egg without any further complications), money tends to become an issue after conception. But for queers, money is often a barrier to getting sperm near egg in the first place. Inseminating with sperm from a sperm bank costs—depending on where you live and what kind of specimens you want—between $300 and $1,000 a month. This might be manageable if one could count on getting pregnant immediately, but the average number of tries before conception, using frozen sperm, is between six and twelve. Adoption is still pricier, usually costing between $10,000 and $20,000. And surrogacy costs the most of all, generally coming in at more than $30,000. Even if you’re lucky enough to go the cheap route—that is, your situation in some way allows you to conceive “naturally”—you’re probably still looking at legal fees for items such as a donor agreement and/or second-party adoption.
Some representations include glancing references to the price of queer parenting; for example, in
Daddy & Papa
it’s mentioned that adopting hardto-place foster children is less expensive than private adoption or trying to adopt a more “desirable” (i.e., young, white, healthy) baby. But the most common approach is simply to ignore money as a factor. Asked by an
Advocate
interviewer why more gay men don’t have children, actor and parent B. D. Wong responds, “I guess a lot of gay people have issues with their parents, and that must color their ideas about whether they want to be parents or not.” Well, sure—but might it also be that they don’t have $10,000 lying around?
Perhaps because the production of offspring by queers so rarely involves sexual intercourse, media representations of queer parents seem positively obsessed by the issue of where the baby comes from. The swell of media attention accompanying the gayby boom focuses not on queer parents who already have children, or queer stepparents joining existing families, but queer people who are making or obtaining children (usually babies). In other words, what you will see on television, in film, and in print is the procurement of babies by queer parents. If you’re a thirty-seven-year-old mother of two, you’ve just left your husband, and you’re trying to coordinate babysitting schedules with dating your first girlfriend, not to mention the issue of coming out to your kids—well, there are plenty of you out there, but your story’s not going to show up on
Queer As Folk
.
In his
Advocate
interview, B. D. Wong delivers the apotheosis of this attitude: “There are no accidental kids of gay parents. Every single gay parent passionately wanted to be a parent.” Oh, really? Did you ask the single dyke on food stamps who has three kids from a former marriage? Or the gay man who just came out to his two teenage kids? Wong’s comment assumes that gay parenting involves a predetermined order of events: First, be gay; second, decide to parent; third, become a parent. Scenarios in which the order of these steps may be shuffled are erased.
Not that people who come out after having children didn’t want their kids, but let’s remember, not all children of queer parents sprout magically in a petri dish. Some of them are already hanging around the house, asking, “What’s rimming?” However, most stories about queer parenting center on a single glimpse: the moment of becoming. It’s as though the plot arc of TLC’s
A Baby Story
—pregnancy, baby shower, birth, next episode—has taken over the queer-parenting narrative. Sometimes there are variations—in adoption stories, the peak moment is not birth but the first contact between parent and child—but the central focus remains the same: a money shot, with baby as climax.