As long as we’re talking tits at the moment I’d like you take a good gander at the magazine cover over there on the right and tell me if you think it’s all that inappropriate. As you can see it involves two things that go together in nature: A baby and a woman’s breast. The baby, being a baby, is doing what babies do when presented with a breast. Considering the cover is for a magazine called BabyTalk it seems like a perfectly reasonable image to make use of. So why is it that some folks seem to be so offended by it?

“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.

Gross? A baby feeding from its mother’s breast is gross?! What the fuck is wrong with that person?

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.”

What the hell is she worried her 13 year-old son might do? Start trying to suckle every woman he comes across? Heaven forbid her son should have a clue what tits are actually supposed to be used for! He might get ideas in his head! Like he hasn’t already.

It’s the same reason that Ash, 41, who nursed all three of her children, is cautious about breast-feeding in public—a subject of enormous debate among women, which has even spawned a new term: “lactivists,” meaning those who advocate for a woman’s right to nurse wherever she needs to.

“I’m totally supportive of it—I just don’t like the flashing,” she says. “I don’t want my son or husband to accidentally see a breast they didn’t want to see.”

Trust me lady, unless it’s their grandmother’s boob then chances are there’s not too many tits out there your husband and son would mind seeing—assuming, of course, that they’re heterosexual. Hell, for that matter, even if they’re gay they probably won’t be offended at the brief site of someone’s tit as they’re setting up to nurse their kid.

“Gross, I am sick of seeing a baby attached to a boob,” wrote Lauren, a mother of a 4-month-old.

It simply amazes me the reaction this garners from people and apparently the majority of them think nursing in public shouldn’t be allowed:

The evidence of public discomfort isn’t just anecdotal. 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.

Grow the fuck up, people. This shouldn’t be a big deal. Hell, at one point in time not THAT long ago, it was the only way to feed a baby.

Found through TPRS.