I have seen Mad Max, and the part with the "human cows" made me angry, I think because it brought up bad memories of how I felt when hooked up to that blasted breast pump with my first baby: used and abused. I had this idea that it was important for my husband to feed the baby too, so every night I would dutifully pump so he could feed her from a bottle. I still think it's important that he got to do that, but the breast pump made me feel like a farm animal (actually, the act of nursing also made me feel like a farm animal, but at least it felt natural), and caused my body to ramp up its production. I could have fed a whole herd of babies! There was just SO MUCH MILK, leaking and spraying and making me sweat like a racehorse all the time. (And my poor daughter. It must have been like drinking from a fire hydrant).
Mochi, that magazine cover is the one I'm writing my paper on! I have to do a reading of it, citing at least two of the texts we've studied this semester (Marx, Althusser, Lacan, Barthes, Said etc). I chose it because it shows a kind of mixed message: on the one hand, I think it's kind of designed to make the target audience (i.e. mothers) feel insecure (ack! Am I doing enough? I'm not doing that); and on the other hand, the image is clearly meant to inspire discomfort in general with the practice of extended breastfeeding. I think it encourages us to think that breastfeeding a toddler is freaky (which many North Americans probably think anyway, because we never see it), and it blurs the line between breastfeeding and sexuality, what with the way the mom is posed, and her modelesque looks and everything.
I'm not a breastfeeding activist (I actually think people go way overboard on pushing breastfeeding) but I kind of thought that ad was a cheap trick to sell magazines, and unfair to women who actually do breastfeed toddlers. I remember seeing it at the time, in 2012, and thinking, good grief.
