Why do we as a country have such an aversion to breastfeeding? Other countries certainly do not feel this way and I think it   reveals how we have viewed nudity through the media in our culture.  To me, I believe the issue lies in the fact that we are sexually repressed as a nation and have been for decades.  In some countries, people do not view nudity as an anomaly as the prevalent nude beaches show.  They see nudity as a part of human nature and it is not treated as an abnormality.  If you don’t believe we are sexually repressed, you just have to watch an episode of Girls Gone Wild.  Because they are sexually repressed in their everyday lives, they feel they must release this pressure over Spring Break, where it is socially acceptable to display your sexuality.  These notions of nudity stem from the old Hollywood movies of yore, where nudity was strictly forbidden.  Then, as Hollywood matured, they enacted rules and regulations and as such, movies pretty much only showed breasts where scenes of sex where involved, and this equated breasts and nudity with sex in our minds, because it was the only time we saw them in popular culture.

When people see a woman breastfeeding, they equate the breast with sex and find it appalling, but it is only because they have been conditioned to see it for so long in a sexually-repressive society that they find it repugnant. It is a social construct, not a tenant of morality to show your body and have it deemed vile.  It is incongruous to think that the two are somehow linked, but linked they are in our social conscience as we can’t see one without thinking of the other.  We’ve been made into Pavlovian dogs by well-meaning entertainment that was trying to protect our consciences, but instead, subverted our ideas of what the human body should represent.  The human body is a work of art that we can only appreciate if it’s clothed or seen nude in socially-acceptable situations like Spring Break and strip clubs, but not on the bench in the park.  Think of the children!  What children?  The one she is feeding?  It is not that we have dirty minds that we equate breasts with sex, but it is our culture and media that have shaped us into this view and that is what we must realize.

If you never realize the origins of your fears, you will never be able to confront them.  We fear nudity because we have been told it isn’t decent and attributes to the downfall of society, and as such, we can only enjoy it as an act of rebellion.  You have in fact fetishized nudity.  Nudity does not equate sex and for that, we have to take back our social conscience as a whole.

 

If you haven’t watched the documentary Kids For Cash, please do.  I am obsessed with our legal and prison systems because it tells what kind of people we are in how we mete out justice.    Another good one is Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss.  A haunting indictment of how we perceive ourselves.  We as a society demand justice and justice comes in the form of prison, jail, death, and rarely reform, because punishment should not be rehabilitative, even if these very people are to be released into our midst in the future.  Who are we to be judge, jury and excecutioner, but more importantly, who does this system benefit?  I especially abhor the treatment of children and how we escalate their judgement equivalent to that of an adult’s.  For what purpose does this serve other than to make us feel superior?

Recently, I’ve heard of kids being tried as adults in the news such as the 2 12-year-old girls from Wisconsin in the ‘Slender Man’ attempted murder and recently, a 14-year old girl, who slit the throat of her brother’s girlfriend.  I condemn their actions and they should be punished and treated for their crimes, but to be tried as adults is an affront to everything we should stand for.  What we should stand for is justice, but what justice is there in treating kids like adults?  If these girls were to be raped by someone, the perpetrators would  be tried as someone who raped a minor, but do they lose their minor status when they also commit a crime?  How can they be a minor in one situation and not in another?  That is not justice but cherry picking of a justice system that favors severe prison sentences for all.

Why do we even have minor statuses if we do not follow them in every case?  You are a minor as long as you don’t commit a crime.  Because hey, you should’ve known better, like an adult, to not commit crimes, and as such, you will be punished as one.  Does that make any sense?  Who is benefiting from this thinking?  Are we as a society more protected?  Or do we just feel better about ourselves when we have the power to change the rules to suit how we feel?  There are plenty of laws that were enacted to make us feel better, but didn’t quit work out such as the Three Strikes Law, which resulted in some people serving lengthy sentences for non-violent crimes while others served shorter terms for one specific violent crime.  Perhaps we should stop enforcing laws and rules based of how we feel and how they actually affect society as a whole.

I think a lot of people were well-intentioned a few decades ago when they were trying to combat racism and taught kids my age that ‘we are all the same.’ The people who grew up with this mantra understood the concept of the idea that the color of our skin should not matter in determining who we are as individuals.  However, it also had an unintended side effect, where white people took this phrase to mean that we all have the same experience, and since they didn’t see in color, they didn’t need to acknowledge the differences that we had.  I’m not blaming them, but it is important to note where this notion came from: the best of intentions.  It is mostly benign because they honestly do not see the color of one’s skin, which was the ultimate goal of ‘we are all the same,’ but in doing so, they erased the differences of who we are.  My friend’s husband is White and she is Asian.  He says he does not see her as Asian, and as such, he does not understand when she claims that people at pre-dominantly white establishments treat her differently.  Why would they treat her differently if she is the same as him?  When you fail to see the differences in who others are, you negate their experience.  Because you think that ‘we are all the same,’ meaning we all shared the same upbringing, parenting styles, culture, and so on, you can ignore someone’s experience based on the color of their skin.  And yet, I continue to hear this phrase uttered because it has saturated our youth and now our adult lives to the point where some people don’t understand the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter,’ and instead implore that ‘All Lives Matter,’ which is very close to ‘we are all the same.’

We are the same in our genetics, but we are not treated the same based off of factors we cannot control. To acknowledge and celebrate our differences does not alienate us, but makes us more aware of OUR diversity.  To continue to proclaim that ‘we are all the same’ propagates the idea that differences don’t matter.  It is important not to assign blame and to know that it is not anyone’s fault for believing it, but we do need to educate ourselves on how that phrase has affected society as a whole.  Oftentimes, White people bear the brunt of this guilt and push back because they are weary of being blamed for race relations.  This in itself also needs to be addressed because if it is not, it results in stagnation.  Change comes in not actions, but thoughts.  Change how you view the situation and each other and a revolution can be born.