This has been linked to by several people already, but I'm going to pretend it wasn't. That means I have a scoop!
It is sort of depraved. Hence complaints such as these:
"I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine," one person wrote. "I immediately turned the magazine face down," wrote another. "Gross," said a third.
....One mother who didn't like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it.
"I shredded it," said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. "A breast is a breast -- it's a sexual thing. He didn't need to see that."
...."I'm totally supportive of [breastfeeding] -- I just don't like the flashing," she said. "I don't want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn't want to see."
...."Gross, I am sick of seeing a baby attached to a boob," wrote Lauren, a mother of a 4-month-old.
Absolutely. I'm revolted by that cover. I mean, where is the mommy supposed to put her lit cigarette and whiskey glass? That baby needs an ashtray on his head, at the very least. At least, that's how this woman does it, in my experience.
Why anyone is squeamish about breastfeeding, I don't know. I honestly don't. If anyone can enlighten me, feel free to clue me in. All I can come up with are that too many adults are uptight weenies. And by too many, I mean far too many: "In a survey published in 2004 by the American Dietetic Association, less than half -- 43 percent -- of 3,719 respondents said women should have the right to breast-feed in public places."
That I think is rather frightening. The laws on this actually vary fairly widely from state to state. Fortunately for my wife and infant son, who do the milk-drinking thing in public fairly regularly, we live in New York.
N.Y. Civil Rights Law § 79-e (McKinney 2002) guarantees a mother the right to breastfeed her baby any place she has the right to be, public or private, even if the nipple is exposed during or incidental to breastfeeding.
N.Y. Penal Law §§ 245.01, 245.02 (McKinney 2002) exempts breastfeeding from laws governing indecent exposure and from laws prohibiting the promotion of indecent exposure.
The link above is pretty handy for any mom travelling with an infant, I should think. So I provide it as a public service. (Those of you interested in things like the different varieties of age of consent laws can Google it for yourselves. Perverts.)