(cover of Time Magazine)
Times
Magazine often decides who should be doing what. At least the people all over
the world, who have the fixation about the United States of America, think so.
If someone or something makes it to its cover page, that person or thing
becomes a thing of beauty and a joy forever, at least to the ones I earlier
mentioned. Times magazine represents the international hegemony of not only
political aesthetics but also aesthetics of politics. That’s why this picture,
a model breast feeding a child (model) becomes important and a thing to be
discussed. Published in the latest issue, this cover page has raised several
eye brows across the world. Eye brows because feminists generally do not shape their
brows and they can raise them.
Are you Mom
Enough? Asks the cover page. The article in question talks about the new age
woman and the need for breast feeding. Breast feeding is something natural to
all the mammals. What we call breasts is a pair of lactating devices seen quite
visible amongst the female species. Human beings are vulgar in nature and they
have made each part of the body a sexual device. You must be remembering how
the cosmetic industry recently pitched in to whiten the vaginal areas by
introducing a new cream. Vaginas world over Unite, you have nothing but to lose
your blackness, the advertisement seemed to say. Feminists and the right
thinking people got really angry on it. Market has become too intrusive; it
creates desires to whiten your penises and vaginas. And to lose appetite and
keep a zero size you can even shorten the length of your intestine through
surgical operation. I am sure one day sex become quite exciting in the lacks
than in the visible and the tactile.
So what is
the problem with breast feeding and this cover page, you may ask. If you are a
super mom you should breast feed. Cosmetic industry once thought that breast
feeding caused the sagging of breasts all over the world and caused a sudden
fall in female grace and beauty. The mammary glands became a quick obsession
and women were asked to stop breast feeding to protect the beauty. Protect the beauty
for whom? For men, of course. They are the permanent infants who want to play
with the breasts of women right from mothers, to wives to strangers. Women are
asked to use pin to puncture the prying hands while travelling in crowded buses
because Indian men would like to grope whatever seen rounded in the female
anatomy.
Feminists
say that this article and the cover page in Time Magazine are objectionable
because in the name of promoting breast feeding it is enhancing desires amongst
men to play more with breasts. Look at the picture. A three year old boy standing
in front of his ‘mother’ and sucks her nipple. The problem is that the whole
world knows that this is a model and the child is not her real son. This very
knowledge makes people think that there is something unnatural about it. And
also nobody thinks that a three year old boy would be still having a staple
diet on his mother’s milk. May be this cover page must be for a change. Often
breast feeding is illustrated with a mother and infant suckling and both
averting their face away from the gazing people. Here the case is different.
Both the mother and son are looking at the gaze of the onlooker; yet it is not
a political counter look. It is a kind of titillating surprise that they want
to impart. Reason, a suckling mother would have tender feelings in her face and
posture. Here the model stands a bit proud though that does not transform into
a motherly pride.
Why this
picture is offensive? It is offensive because it is pure sex that is connoted here.
If you ask me if sex is something wrong, I would say sex is not wrong but open
display of oedipal love is something objectionable. There is not a single man
on the face of this earth who never had had sexual fantasies about his mother.
I used to have. Because, mother’s body is the first naked woman body that any
male see in the world. It is quite natural to push such scenes behind the mind.
But in the subconscious it works and sexual fantasises come up when you are
really pathetic in your mental state. And oedipal complex is something that
anyone cherishes secretly. This picture is all about the open display of
oedipal love. There is no women’s empowerment through breast feeding in it.
Now, in our
Indian context, if you ask what is this fuss about breast feeding all about?
Apart from the middle class and upper class societies, the majority of women in
India are not concerned with their body mass index when it comes to breast
feeding. They happily feed their children and I believe we have made legal
provisions for the working mothers to have six months of maternity leave so
that they could breast feed their newly born kids. No man in particularly
sexual when he sees a woman breast feeding a child even in the public space. In
fact, more than the breast feeding women, the men avert their eyes if they
chance upon a woman feeding her child. In India, people do not take offense if
a woman breast feed a child and a baby animal at the same time. But the
Americans often see sex in everything.
But a three
year old child is not breast fed by a young woman in public like the way Time
magazine has shown. As a child I was very curious to play with my mother’s
breasts. I used to wait even when I was seven or eight years old, at the door
of her room where she changed her clothes. If I got a chance to go inside the
first thing I did was squeezing her breasts. It was obviously a sexual act,
which I did not know had sexual connotations. I had a happy breast fed
childhood. Also like any other man who fantasizes drinking milk from breasts I
too had it and I also tasted it as a grown up man. Let me tell you it does not
taste that great.
Anyway, Time
magazine cover page must be treated as super shit and it is all made for male
gaze. It is covert sex or pornography in the name of promoting breast feeding.
It has killed the innocence of that child (who knows a three year old does not have
sexual fantasies). It has made the model yet another object of desire, nameless
and faceless. The image is pornographic because it adds to the male fantasy
that they have quick suckies behind the doors in the same posture (I have done
that).
Postscript:
Recently a friend of mine forwarded a joke via sms. It said: Why men look at
women’s breasts? Answer: They can focus on two things at a time.
2 comments:
Hello Johny,why do you waste ur precious time and intelligence in writing about such a stupid ad as u urself agree?
Boobs Feeding for Husband and Breast Feeding for son...
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