Archives for August 29th, 2006

“Breasts like bombs!” deserves the title of headline of the year. (Nova’s original photo here < -- NSFW!)

For its August issue, the American parenting magazine Babytalk published a picture of a child nursing on its cover. The picture, which you can see here, shows a breast in profile and, according to this AP story, “sparked an outrage.” One angry Texan woman told a reporter that she “shredded it” when she saw it. Her reasoning?

“A breast is a breast — it’s a sexual thing.”

I won’t dignify that masterful tautology with a response, but before you laugh it off as just another crazy lady in Texas let me point out that, according to a 2004 survey by the American Dietetic Association, a majority of Americans do not support breastfeeding in public places. And if you look at this page of U.S. breastfeeding laws, you’ll see that not all 50 states have legislation allowing mothers to breastfeed in any private or public location. (As of April, just 32 of them do)

As for the Babytalk cover itself: in a poll of 4,000 of the magazine’s readers (overwhelmingly women with both children and breasts) 25% thought the picture was “inappropriate.”

One can only imagine what they’d think of, say, this (nsfw) recent Stern Magazine cover. Or, here in Slovenia, the recent Nova magazine cover featuring Špela from Atomik Harmonik, topless. (Here are the pictures in question: 1, 2)

Of course, the Špela pictures did also cause a bit of a stir here. But not about whether Nova should have published them on the front page, or at all, but whether Špela has had “enhancement surgery” and if the candid-seeming photos were, in fact, candid.

But even there, there wasn’t much controversy.