I've been researching censorship and many related issues of suppression, oppression, and repression. And I realized a kind of no-brainer today about the very odd yet pervasive discomfort about breastfeeding in public. Women's bodies can only be seen by these people as either sexual or non-sexual. In any state of undress, a woman's body must only be placed in the "sexual" category. If the onlooker or gazer deems the woman as not desirable/ not attractive/ not sexy, then their stunted brain only knows to reject what they see. "Hide that! Nobody wants to see that!" they'll react to virtually any part of any woman who doesn't look like a model from a magazine.
They are only capable of feeling either attraction or revulsion toward any woman. This is probably worse than mental stuntedness. It's stunting of the full and normal range of human emotions.
The breastfeeding context is the most dramatic example because the appropriate human emotional response to this most essential yet most basic part of motherhood would be tenderness, appreciation, even joy at seeing a mother nourishing their vulnerable little baby or young child. A new life is being nurtured. But this kind of tenderness and joy are being essentially beaten out of the world--our society, our culture, our lives. Though this is an offshoot of the male gaze (Laura Mulvey, 1973), this stunted attitude is well prevalent in women also. This toxicity comes from everywhere and imprints itself on all of us to some degree. Seeing it, understanding it, and choosing to undo it liberates all of us.
What kind of world do we live in that feeding our young is seen as "disgusting," "lewd," "dirty," or "obscene?" Have we only been regressing for thousands of years? Social media certainly isn't helping anything. It's only been serving to reinforce the same antiquated, regressive, absurd, repressive, shit-headed puritanical attitudes that have been fucking everything up since before pilgrims even thought to bring their bullshit over on the Mayflower.
Just please consider what humans are. How beautiful and brave it is to bring a child into the world, protect them, and nurture them the best we can, and then let them go into the world to do the best they can. All these acts of faith are tough enough.
How many of our campaigns for rights and freedoms are just people asking for no more than to do what humans need to do: Raise our young. Feed, clothe, and house ourselves or each other. Honest pay for honest work. Access to ordinary necessary medical services. Education to move us forward and raise us all upward.
Commodification, proprietary extremes, disposability, and planned obsolescence are no way to run a civilization. The same goes for artifical scarcity.
There are more of us than there are of them, but we've been letting them take everything away from us for centuries, millennia. We quibble over who was born in what decade, and we judge others based on completely irrelevant assumptions and beliefs, when they're not even harming anyone.
This is basic shit. I can't break it down more simply. Humans attack other humans for being regular-assed humans. It's time that we "other" humans to stand up to all of it. "All of it" is everything trying to turn us into machines or replace us with machines. Anything trying to tell us, "Those people are less than human."