What the main sex symbol IS actually for

Press, 19 June 1979, Page 12

What the main sex symbol IS actually for

WHITEHORNS WORLD

Katharine Whitehorn

London "It’s always the men who stick up those foul girlie posters that make the most fuss about breast-feeding in public,” sighed a feminist friend of mine the other day. And probably it’s because breasts have become our main sex symbol that half the Western world seems to have forgotten what they are actually for. However, there are some pretty determined moves to get the breast back where it belongs — firmly plugged into the mouth of a contented infant. There’s the La Leche people, a crusading group started in America, who see no need to wean their babies until they are two or more if the baby and mother so desire. There’s an arm of the National Childbirth Trust, in Britain that also does stalwart work, going round teaching, mothers how it’s done, and helping them when- it doesn’t Work out quite the Madonna-like way you think it should. Both battle hard against the practice that still exists in some British hospitals: of keeping the baby from trying to suck until a day or more has gone by and rushing at them with bottles of cow’s milk at the least sign of trouble. I’d always thought the main thing in favour of breast-feeding was that it was one bit of baby gear you couldn’t leave behind at the last picnic place; but there are more formidable arguments in its favour than that. They still don’t know what causes cot deaths and it could be allergy to cow’s milk; a babe gets immunities from its mother’s milk; and if it is breast-fed it’s five times less likely td get allergies. Since you cannot pass the breast over to nanny or child-minder, breastfeeding does ensure that mother and child have a good chance-of “bonding” in the proper way. What’s really tragic is that, just as the developed world is looking askance at bottle-feeding, the poorer countries are being conned by the milk firms into thinking it "modem”: there have been plenty of scandals of salesgirls being dressed up as nurses, or women being

encouraged to go on to the bottle, even though the cost of it would take 80 per cent of the family income. You’d have thought that the evidence in favour of breast-feeding was now so strong that no-one who could feed her own baby would decide not to; so why is it that only one baby in TOO, in Britain, is still breast-fed by the time it's six months? Of course, all these earnest breast missionaries may have put a few people off — they do go round making you feel an awfuj failure if you can’t produce the milk, and hint

darkly that there’s something wrong with ydur psych o-sexual subconscious; but that can’t be the main cause. Again, people do feel a bit self-conscious about hauling out a bosom in a public place. But Esther Rantzen, the British T V personality who breast-fed her baby in a blaze eft publicity, says its perfectly possible to feed your baby and stay modest; half the time the other people in the room don't even know what you’re doing. And, anyway, modesty isn’t exactly a characteristic of Western woman these days. No: there has to be a strong reason. And we were given a hint at it by Helene Hayman, until recently a British M.P., who was forced to go to the House of Commons td vote during the time she’d planned to stay home nursing her baby. Addressing a conference on breast-feeding, she read out some of the letters she’d got when her breastfeeding hit the public eye. “This disgusting practice . .. young mothers should never be taught about it . > . animal . . . revolting ...” the vitriolic denunciations of this perfectly natural practice gave a very nasty insight indeed into some of the revulsions people feel about it. So who is it who is really disgusting — the ones who get a straight animal pleasure out of giving suck to their

young? Or the ones who think a bottle is a nice, clean, fresh, healthy thing for a baby — and don’t lets have any of this filthy business about flesh? According to the speakers at the conference, the worst complainers are men over 50 who were educated at all-boy boarding schools. So put that in your bottle and suck it; it tells me all I need td know. — Copyright — Observer Syndication Service. .