Breast in show

I spent the better part of an hour last week looking at pictures of babies and breasts. A baby's head, feeding at his mother's exposed chest. A baby and an older kid, one on each boob. Classical paintings of Madonna and child, complete with naked breast. It was an in-your-face parade of mammary art. Or, rather, in-your-Facebook.

The gallery was posted by a Facebook group called "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!," launched by a woman whose breastfeeding bliss collided with corporate standards. She had posted a profile photo - a sort of signature stamp on the networking site - of her baby at her breast. When someone complained, Facebook took the photo down, citing its anti-nudity policy.

That was more than a year ago, when Facebook wasn't quite so universal. Last month, on a whim, a mother of four from Ottawa decided it was time to protest again. Stephanie Knapp Muir proposed a one-day demonstration, in which users would post their own in-the-act breastfeeding shots. More than 11,000 people took part. A few more held a "nurse-in" outside of Facebook's California headquarters. As of last week, the "Hey, Facebook. . ." group had ballooned to more than 160,000 members, with the potential to expose 320,000 breasts. It prompted critics to ask the obvious question: Do you really need to show those to the world?

"Why do you need a photo of your kid eating his first birthday cake?" Muir countered, when I spoke to her by phone. Facebook is a diary, she said, and for many new mothers, nursing "becomes a very central part of your life. Why exclude or segregate that?"

Facebook agrees, in principle, that breastfeeding isn't obscene, spokesman Barry Schnitt told me. But with 800 employees and 150 million users, he said, "we don't have the resources to convene a panel for every photo and decide whether it's art or whether it's natural." Hence, a simple rule: no nudity, no matter what. "If it's the Sistine Chapel but it's on your butt, it's going to come down."

In truth, Facebook's nudity policy isn't different from that of most media outlets. And I'm willing to wager that plenty of breastfeeding women are fine with it, too. Discreet nursing happens to be a growing industry; one mother recently showed me her "Bebe au Lait," a brightly patterned smock that covers baby and breast. (Its original name was "Hooter Hider," but the company decided that, to break into the high-end market, it needed to sound more refined.) I'm in the throes of nursing an infant now, but I don't wish for a world where women bare their breast at will. I'd much rather be guaranteed a clean, quiet, out-of-the-way nursing space in every public building, store, or cultural center. As it was, in a local museum recently, I hid beneath a stairwell to feed my son.

But Muir thinks out in the open is best, and she cries discrimination: Men can show their nipples all over the planet and no one says a peep. (And there are a gazillion bare breasts on the Internet - no babies attached.) She longs for a day when public nursing is so commonplace as to be unremarkable, and vows to fight "until the day no woman is ever asked to 'be more discreet' again."

I can certainly see her point. Breastfeeding is a big, sometimes painful commitment, and because it isn't ingrained in our culture, the world can feel conspired against it. Some of my relatives keep asking when my son will switch to formula, as if I've fallen in with a silly new-age fad. Massachusetts only recently joined the many states that protect breastfeeding mothers from charges of indecent exposure.

But elevating nursing to some exalted status doesn't seem so healthy, either, and that seems to be the danger in that flood of profile pics. Nursing gets equated with motherhood itself, and that doesn't do new mothers any favors. I know women who couldn't nurse, for a range of physical reasons, and were berated in public by strangers. I know women who have nursed through great hardship or pain, too guilt-ridden to switch to formula. Nursing is great, I've wanted to tell them, but there's plenty more to parenting than how you feed your kid. That's another message I wouldn't mind seeing on Facebook.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com