Chandler's favorite breastfeeding mom has officially brought her fight to Tempe.
After successfully convincing the Chandler City Council to approve an ordinance allowing women to breastfeed wherever "a mother and child are allowed to be," 29-year-old Amy Milliron asked the Tempe City Council to act similarly, and "prove how family-friendly this city is," according to The Arizona Republic.
Speaking for ASU and its 60,000 partying, part-time residents, I'm inclined to argue that Tempe will be particularly receptive to her request for two reasons. First of all, ASU is incredibly family-friendly.
Some universities honor students based on an elitist system of "merit" and "smarts." But Tempe residents and Playboy alike guarantee that, even if students don't bring home straight A's, they can still have something to show mom and dad on parent's weekend: the corner of page 56 in Playboy's college issue. Tell me that doesn't bring a family together!
And secondly, ASU is notoriously breast-friendly. Between the loads of freshmen women flashing to get into frat parties and the half-dozen or so perky, post-op tube tops that I see walking to class every day, it's pretty safe to assume that ASU doesn't exactly hate them.
Milliron should feel right at home exposing herself here. Except, of course, she didn't and doesn't expose herself.
She told The New Times, that the scandal started at a public pool where she breastfed her baby from behind a blanket a friend held in front of her. Though far more scandalous behavior must regularly occur at public pools, an employee asked her to bring her baby into the restroom because teenagers at the pool found her breastfeeding offensive.
So what exactly was so offensive about her concealing her nudity at a pool? Could people have somehow sexualized the act of breastfeeding, finding that vulgar? It's a hard sell, especially if you've ever seen a woman breastfeed. It's not particularly sexy.
But maybe that's exactly the problem. With so much riding on being sexy these days, perhaps individuals are developing a distaste for women who aren't hypersexualized. Plastic surgery, pornography and primetime television, it seems, are redefining womanhood.
Consider my post-op, giant-sunglasses-wearing friends strolling down the malls. The trend isn't just bigger, but rounder, perkier and "nippier" than prescribed by Mother Nature, even at her kindest and most generous.
Then again, the effect isn't meant to simulate nature. Rather, it's attractive because it simulates sex. During arousal, after all, the breasts swell, grow rounder and firmer and the nipples become erect, much like breast implants.
Though sexual arousal is a welcome, wonderful part of nature, notice that it doesn't occur round the clock and that breasts, like penises, go back to normal after a while. Maybe that's because Mother Nature -- that early feminist -- knew that women were more than their breasts.
Pornography more obviously hypersexualizes women. Barry McCarthy, a therapist and author of "Rekindling Desire" told Psychology Today that the reason men are attracted to pornography is because its women are "ever ready, always willing to do anything to please a man. No real woman could or would want to be that way."
The porn star does not exist outside of her sexual identity. She doesn't use the toilet, have a real job or even wear sweaters. She has shed every other aspect of womanhood to increase her sexual identity.
And even "Desperate Housewives" is in on it. Of the five main characters, only Gabrielle is modestly endowed, though she makes up for this by being the most sexualized character on the show.
Sure, Edie gives her a run for the money with her typecast sexuality, but Gabrielle gets the most on-screen action, between her husband and her underage boyfriend.
Two of the five women on the show are mothers, and this plays directly into their sexuality. Susan, who is fond of short skirts and very into her plumber boyfriend, is a careless, if not bad, mother to her teenage daughter. She's also portrayed as uncompromisingly sexy.
Lynette, however, who is preoccupied with being a good mother to several young boys, is quite obviously the least sexy on the cast. She spends less, if any time, wearing lingerie and has no scandalous liaisons to speak of. Motherhood, it seems, cannot be sexy.
This issue is really at the heart of Milliron's breast-feeding debacle. There's just something so obscene about a woman's body being exploited in such a nonsexual way.
Motherhood just doesn't fit in with our new image of womanhood. Life is slowly becoming a skewed version of the "Stepford Wives." And before Tempe can prove that it's really "family-friendly," as Milliron asks, it really needs to prove that it's woman-friendly first -- that is, friendly to all women whatever her identity.
Catherine Traywick is a journalism and English literature junior. Reach her at Catherine.Traywick@asu.edu.
