exposure

Not the ad I saw, but typical of
American Apparel. Boobies everywhere!

The other day, I was driving along, minding my own business, when I pulled up behind a city bus and was smacked in the face with a huge ad for American Apparel. The ad featured a woman laying down and wearing a yellow cardigan with nothing underneath. The sweater was pulled open to show massive boobage- I mean, you could see just about everything but the nipple.

And here this ad is, driving around the city for everyone to see.

Don't get me wrong- I'm not some sort of crazy conservative who thinks that bikinis should be banned and that women should only be allowed to show their hands and feet in public. I don't even necessarily think that ads like this should be banned on the basis of showing to much skin (although I won't get into my thoughts on the exploiting of sex and women's bodies in order to sell a product).

But in the wake of the nurse-ins at Target and the plethora of people that think that women shouldn't be able to breastfeed in public (check out these stupid comments!), seeing these kinds of things make me a little angry. Ads like this are all over the place. Women walk around wearing low cut shirts and string bikinis everywhere. It's not too hard to see a boob in public- so why this controversy over nursing? When I nurse Baby S, I pretty much show nothing, and I don't even use a cover.

What is the message here? Are we, as a society, saying that women's bodies are to be used for sex but not nurturing? For marketing but not nourishing? There is something very, very wrong with this.

Perhaps the people that make these comments are trying to discourage women from nursing in public. But it has had the opposite effect on me- if anything, I now want to nurse in public more. Let's normalize the act of breastfeeding, and reclaim our bodies and our femininity from the marketers and sex industry that has obviously corrupted the american psyche. Breasts are for breastfeeding first and foremost! Nothing too crazy and shocking about that.