Moral Mob Mauled Blind by Janet's Areola Borealis: "Published on Tuesday, February 10, 2004 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal
by Pierre Tristam
"At Halifax Memorial Hospital three months ago I found myself locked, without a valid avenue of escape, in a four-hour seminar on breastfeeding. Expectant mothers outnumbered extraneous fathers by a ratio of six to one, though there I was, one of those ones duly seated next to my wife and the future terror she was carrying. I wasn't playing sensitive husband. I have no illusions that men could be much more than third wheels when it comes to such things as birth and breastfeeding. The sensitivity cartel finds things for men to do, of course. But if make-work of the foot-massage and shoulder-to-cry-on variety generally makes men feel less useless, it doesn't begin to diminish post-partum agonies on the other side (nor make up for only vicariously experiencing the elation of life-giving). The reason I was attending the seminar was mostly anthropological. I wanted to take stock of the breast in third-millennium America. If the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons, as Dostoevsky may or may not have said, the degree of imbecility in a society can be judged by the way it handles its breasts. Come to find that I could have skipped the four-hour epic at Halifax for the flash of Janet Jackson's areola borealis at the Superbowl halftime show. The cultural uprising let loose by that split-second flop says more about the nation's arrested development than a year's worth of Ph.D. theses from every sociology department in the hemisphere. "