Parenting magazine puts porn on its cover!

"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.

These readers weren't complaining about a sexually explicit cover, but rather one of a baby nursing, on a wholesome parenting magazine -- yet another sign that Americans are squeamish over the sight of a nursing breast, even as breast-feeding itself gains greater support from the government and medical community.

Babytalk is a free magazine whose readership is overwhelmingly mothers of babies. Yet in a poll of more than 4,000 readers, a quarter of responses to the cover were negative, calling the photo -- a baby and part of a woman's breast, in profile -- inappropriate.

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 a bunch of prudes! Ladies I beg to differ with you but I have seen me some porn, and that cover is not porn. Well at least it isn't very good porn.

We are so uptight about these kinds of things these days it is unreal. I know that MTV and the Spike channel are doing the best they can, but there are still a lot of people in this country with a huge stick up their butt. (By the way, a stick up your butt? That would be porn!)

You know this reminds me of a story.

When I was teaching gymnastics to a group of four and five year olds I had a number of the moms that would sit in the bleachers and watch as their children practiced tumbling and trampoline skills.

One day after the class I went up to one of the mothers to tell her how well her boy had done that day, and was several sentences into the discussion when the towel that she had draped over her shoulder fell to the ground and exposed her nursing baby and her milk engorged breast. I immediately tried to avert my eyes and totally lost my train of thought, just sort of hemmin and hawing until she had replaced the towel and covered her exposed body part. When I looked back I could see that she was very amused by my response and was trying to suppress her laughter. I quickly finished relaying my information to her and walked back ot my office.

Later it occurred to me that I had probably overreacted to the incident and that I would try ot be much more cool about these things in the future. (There were a number of nursing mothers who had children in my classes.) Which I was.

It is not a sex object when it is feeding a baby. Then it is a restaurant. It only becomes a sex object again when the baby is not in the room and it is covered with lingerie.