Olivia Wide and breastfeeding

There has hardly been a site that hasn't written about the photo of Olivia Wide in the past week. In a shoot for the September issue of Glamour US, she talks about her newborn son Otis, who came into the world in April this year. Breastfeeding is one of the topics discussed in the interview that accompanied the photo, and to add image to word, there is a, it must be said: beautiful photo of Olivia and Otis, while she is breastfeeding him. And somehow, that is world news.

And this is not the first time. Every time a female celebrity breastfeeds her child and captures it, there is a bit of a stir and commotion. Not long ago, she posted Gisele Bündchen a photo of herself while her three-member glam squad was getting her ready for an important event, while she was breastfeeding her child. Or Miranda Kerr, she also put herself on the web with son Flynn at her breast and there was also much ado about that.

And it's certainly not all negative. Many people seize such a moment to spread the gospel of breastfeeding, while others take a somewhat modest stance and dance around their actual message with many difficult words: “You just don’t do such a photo.”

“Every time a female celebrity breastfeeds her child and captures it, there is a bit of a stir and commotion”

And actually, actually, that is incredibly strange. I have given birth to very few children myself and have therefore never really delved into the discussion of whether or not to breastfeed, so I won't interfere with that. But (and at the risk of sounding like a staunch SGP member), in a world where breasts appear on every screen every ten minutes, where everything from sports socks to hair ties is marketed through a sexually tinted advertisement and models like Miranda and Gisele are seen more often without clothes than with them, why are we so shocked by breastfeeding women?

Isn't it incredibly hypocritical and at least just very strange that we find breasts perfectly fine and acceptable, but as soon as we see them in the role for which Mother Nature originally intended them, we dedicate mass headlines and articles to it? Ever seen an article “model naked in Playboy”? And even when a celeb is spotted topless on the beach, the situation is less significant than when there is a child at that breast. And not only that, because look at any random beach and you can count about 12 breasts, but when a woman wants to feed her child, she goes 9 out of 10 times to sit somewhere in a discreet corner. I don't know, I find that strange, that fear of the natural.

In any case, the relevant Glamour with The Photo (by Patrick Demarchelier) will be available in the States from mid-August. And for those who want to know more about breastfeeding, they can turn to the Huffington Post. They have Parent’s World Breastfeeding Week now. You know, after they had World Topless Week. Just saying.