The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
So Time really wanted to sell some magazines. Can you imagine an image more provocative than a three-year-old child with his mouth around the nipple of his young, fit, attractive twenty-six-year old mother–or at least an image that’s that provocative without also being straight up pornographic?
The picture captures a whole range of hotly controversial topics, from public breastfeeding, to attachment parenting, to incest, to the arrested development of kids these days. But what’s truly revealing about Time‘s cover, and the controversy surrounding it, is not the age of the child. It’s our culture’s growing anxieties about Mom and Motherhood. Showing off that you’re a mom or that you’re body is preparing to become one is taboo. It's similarly taboo to show child birth on television or in the movies--and for anything at all to be taboo in Hollywood is really saying something.
Were these aspects of womanhood as taboo as they are today, or is it only a recent development in the history of our culture? That's a question I consider further over at Acculturated. The short answer, it seems, is that they weren't always taboo. The longer answer, which involves the rise of feminism and the decoupling of female sexuality from nature, is here.
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May '10
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
Well, here is the parody version, pointed out to me courtesy of some guy named Don Robinson.
May '11
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
I don't watch much of what Hollywood produces but I remember a pretty dramatic birthing scene in Rosemary's Baby. This might invade Too Much Information territory but I find something almost erotic (I emphasize almost) about a pregnant woman's appearance. The sexual activities of pregnant women is probably not taboo in Hollywood just not choosing abortion is considered problematic.
Dec '11
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
The only thing that shocked me was the age of the child.
Sep '11
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
Last I looked, I was a mammal. Not only my species, but the entire class within our Phylum is defined by this gland. This is a pretty big chunk of the phylogenetic tree. The fact that this is even a discussion means pretty much means that all is lost.
Jun '10
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
On Glenn Beck's radio program this morning he called on artists to conjure up a spoof of the Time cover but replacing the mother with Barack Obama and replacing the young boy with an Occupy Wall Street protester with his lips around one of the President's nipples.
Just thought I'd share.
E.J.?
Sep '11
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
Addressing your article:
These are all good points but I would like to see a discussion of public displays of pregnancy/motherhood in America from founding until the Jazz Age. Did mothers withdraw? Did they breastfeed in public in a time when men lingered at the train station for hours to catch a glimpse of a bare female ankle? I truly don't know. Victorian style may have called for big-busted & curvaceous, but I don't know if I would call someone trying to achieve an 18" waist "robust".
Libs will just as quickly blame American "Puritanism", which they will then (via the umbrella term "religious right") associate it with Conservatism.
May '11
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
"Showing off that you’re a mom or that you’re body is preparing to become one is taboo."
Emily, that part of your post doesn't make sense to me. The Hollywood taboo seems to me be based mostly on the gynecological/sensitivity realities that make filming actual childbirth unappealing to audiences. I have not met any young woman, married or otherwise, who is not proud to show off her fertile status.
Apr '11
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
I can't help but think TIME is just setting out the next bait for faux controversy. I guess the economy is all better now so we can talk about attachment parenting or something?
Sep '10
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
From my limited point of view, I see much more public breast-feeding and at least as much obvious pregnancy now as I did as a kid, 50 years ago or so. That goes along with the let-it-all-hang-out attitude that has been prevalent since the 60s. I don't see how you can consider these things taboo in any sense of the word.
I don't doubt that culture has changed a bit since the days of Venus of Willendorf, but that shouldn't be much of a surprise.
I'm also not sure that Kate Moss represents the current ideal of womanhood, but I'm admittedly pretty out of touch.
Nov '11
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
A question and a comment:
Would it be wrong to kick the chair out from underneath that kid?
Regarding the "decoupling of female sexuality from nature": Whoever formulates an effective 100% gluten-free organic birth control pill will make billions, and that success will mark the death of irony.
Edited on May 12, 2012 at 12:36amMay '10
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
Funny, but not really where Matthews has his lips pressed.
Jun '10
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
My daughter-in-law nursed all three of her children (my own daughters tried, but it didn't work). My daughter-in-law is a model of restraint and somehow managed to cover herself while she did it.
No one was embarrassed, her dignity was maintained, and no one else felt uncomfortable. I believe any reasonably coordinated person can pull this off. I hesitate to call public breast-feeding a taboo: for me, it's a matter simple politeness.
Yes, it's a natural act, and a good one for both mother and child. Going to the bathroom is also a natural act, but I still close the door.
Re Time, I subscribed for over 30 years. As it became more and more irrelevant, I found I wasn't reading it and cancelled my subscription. This cover reminds me why.
Yes, I am unashamedly old-fashioned.
Edited on May 12, 2012 at 12:28amRe: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
Emily, where do you live?
Out in the boondocks, where I have lived now for a very long time, there is nothing odd about a woman breast-feeding. Whether in Hillsdale, Michigan or in Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is what women with babies do. When I was young, perhaps, women in this circumstance were quarantined, but I grow old, I grow old, I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Perhaps, where Time is edited, this is a shocker. But that may explain why no one buys or reads Time anymore. Is it not the case that, where Time is edited, infants are considered positively obscene? The last time I checked Manhattan had the lowest birthrate of any county in the US -- apart from a county in Hawaii where the majority of the population belonged to a leper colony. (I am not making this up).
Edited on May 12, 2012 at 2:17amRe: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
Paul A. Rahe:
The Time cover is just another indication of the desperation of the legacy media and of the degree to which those who edit it are clueless· 0 minutes ago
Mar '11
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
Which one?
May '10
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
No mention of the Korean Oreo advert?
Feb '11
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
Having been standing in the checkout line with my eyes unable to avoid reading about this starlet's baby bump and that starlet's pregnancy with her dream man, I am not feeling like this is a correct statement: "Showing off that you’re a mom or that your body is preparing to become one is taboo."
I will say that women today are supposed to have a very unhealthy and weird disconnect from their bodies, and it starts in my mind with the fact that the vast majority of women mis-trust their reproductive system and try for much of their lives to control it with medication or surgery, rather than understand how it works and use that knowledge to determine their actions.
Edited on May 12, 2012 at 1:58amNov '11
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
Are we to choose only between the post-post-modern crudity of the Time cover or the self-destructiveness of contemporary feminism or the cruelty of ancient fertility goddess worship?
Sometimes I do think that Western Civilization (if the term retains meaning) has completely, utterly, totally, irredeemably, lost its bearings with respect to sexuality, reproduction, masculinity, femininity, marriage, family, child-rearing . . .
. . . twenty-five hundred years of civilization . . . down the drain.
Dec '10
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
Breastfeeding is natural. Whether the activity belongs on a magazine cover is another matter.
But, at some age of the development of the child, breastfeeding must be considered unnatural. Sorry. It simply isn't adaptive for an 8-year-old to come home from school and latch onto his mother's breast, as H.L. Hunt(?) did. However, I'm pretty sure even Mrs. Hunt wouldn't have been pictured on a magazine cover in such a state.
Dec '10
Re: The Time Cover and Our Mom Anxieties
I see many women in my area parading around in skin tight maternity clothes. It seems to me they are overly proud of their procreative acts. I've seen some women even carrying their babies facing out as if to say, "Look! I have a successful uterus." I'm not sure of what to make of it all.