Human Unnature

This post took a long time before I actually wrote it and I suspect that I may generate some old-standing and needed controversy. I hope to offend no one with my view in this issue. Without further ado, here it is…

I continue to be puzzled between nature vs. nurture, or more accurately between nature vs. culture, specially in regard to some aspects of life that are very natural to me. In my last trip while waiting for my flight in LAX (yes, I had to wait a long time for my connecting flight) a lady with a baby in his stroller sat in front of me. The baby started to cry and she took him out of the stroller and started her struggle to breastfeed him. The struggle was twofold. One was trying to hold the baby, keeping in place a cloth over her shoulder so that no one could see her taking her breast out. The second one was once she started to feed her offspring and this battle was between the baby and her. He was uncomfortable with the cloth over his face. I started to think that being breastfeeding the most human and natural of things, culture or prejudice had made it so awkward for mothers, babies and everyone around them.

I sympathize with the baby because for him or for any baby, food is necessary and natural. I started to wonder, what if we all have to put a cloth over our heads so that no one else could see what we are eating. That would be certainly uncomfortable. Why have we humans in many cultures made female breasts and breastfeeding something to hide? What is wrong with that or better yet, what is wrong with us? We cannot blame Freud because I believe this custom came much earlier than his time, but his theories certainly must’ve helped to exacerbate the situation.

This issue has taken larger proportions than the one I just narrated. Not long ago, a lady in a shopping mall in San Juan, Puerto Rico, asked the manager of a store permission to sit for a moment to breastfeed her baby. The manager, a woman, didn’t allow such thing in her store. Of course, this incident made the way into the media, which generated very justified protests against the store. But whether it is denying a woman permission to breastfeed in a store or a woman struggling to hide breastfeeding in a public place we humans have made one of the most natural things in human life the most humanly unnatural issue. Well, fortunately not in all cultures. Some so-called “primitive cultures” see nothing wrong in women’s breast or breastfeeding. A few years ago when I was living in Colombia I was in a small village called Juanchaco. I saw a group of native Colombians (I should say real Colombians) entering the village with t-shirts on top. Someone told me they covered their breasts only when they were in town, forced, I suppose, by the customs of us the “advanced western culture”. Why is it then that we men do not have to cover our chest? In this issue I think cultural prejudice has taken us too far. “Culture” (the quotation marks are intentional) has become human unnature or anti-nature.