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Breastfeeding Women Should Cover Up, Protecting Weak Evangelical Men From Lust

ban boobs

Heavy doses of snark ahead. You’ve been warned!

As I have detailed several times before, many Evangelicals have what I call boob-a-phobia — the fear of breasts. This phobia is quite common among Evangelical men who have feasted on a steady diet of complementarian, patriarchal, women-are-Jezebels, men-are-weak-pathetic-helpless-horndogs preaching and teaching. Women are expected to keep their bodies covered at all times lest a glimpse of their cleavage, legs, or feminine shape causes widespread male lust. Women are always viewed as gatekeepers. It’s up to them to make sure that visually-driven Jesus-loving man-children don’t see anything in the appearance of women that might cause them to say to themselves, nice. (Jesus heard that buddy! Repent!)

Recently Fundamentalist morality policewoman Lori Alexander thought it important to write about breastfeeding church women causing Christian men to have non-procreation boners. Here’s what Alexander and one of her acolytes had to say:

It’s amazing how many Christian women think it’s fine and dandy to openly breastfeed their babies and show their breasts to men who aren’t their husbands. It riles women up when I teach them to be modest and discreet even while breastfeeding. They falsely believe that breasts aren’t sexual and it’s men’s fault if they like to see breasts while nursing because they are “perverts.”

Women have told me that Jesus’ mother Mary breastfed openly in the temple and Catholics have shown me pictures of Mary’s breast hanging out in preparation to nurse her baby. There isn’t one single Bible verse that tells us that she breastfed openly! Not one. I am sure she was known as a godly, discreet, and modest woman since God chose her to bear His Son.

….

Here is a comment from one wise women on this topic:

It’s like people don’t read the scriptures anymore and do word studies. It annoys me. Men are visual or there wouldn’t be so many verses about the body in Song of Solomon alone! But since this is about breasts here are just a few verses on them.

Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love. — Proverbs 5:19

This verse is implying that the breasts are satisfying and here we are seeing the encouragement for them to always make a man filled with delight. The King James uses the word satisfy which implies that they are satisfying to a man. They aren’t drawn to things that are not satisfying.

Both satisfy and delight mean to be filled, take pleasure in. It is the same delight that is used when it says God delights in His people. The way God delights in His people is the way a man is to be about his wife’s breasts only. But like everything that is beautiful in God’s Holy Word and ways, it gets perverted by the world we live in and you have men delighting in other women’s breasts and you have women practicing zero discretion. Zero.

If that wasn’t enough to show that men like breasts here is another verse:

Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that graze among the lilies. — Song of Solomon 4:5

Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit. Oh may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples. — Song of Solomon 7:7-8

How beautiful are your feet in sandals, O noble daughter! Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of a master hand. Your navel is a rounded bowl that never lacks mixed wine. Your belly is a heap of wheat, encircled with lilies. Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.– Song of Solomon 7:1-13

The man in Song Of Solomon was clearly attracted to this woman’s breasts. Why did God allow that to be in His word for everyone to read? Because men love breasts and in the context of marriage it is a beautiful thing! But again the perverted world we live in would like to believe this isn’t true or simply don’t care like they do with homosexuality. They believe it simply isn’t true that God hates it or they don’t care.

Alexander oh-so-wrongly believes that men always view female breasts in a sexual manner. The same with legs or the feminine shape. Evidently, the men she and her followers have been around are unable to distinguish between breasts that are being sexually satisfying and breasts used as milk wagons for junior. In their minds, any exposure is an open invitation to lust. Perhaps this says more about these men than it does breastfeeding mothers who dare to do what is natural and normal when breastfeeding their babies.

One commenter on Alexander’s post had this to say:

fear of breasts

This commenter doubts whether breastfeeding “exhibitionists” are True Christians®. Why, no True Christian® woman would ever expose any part of her breasts while breastfeeding. Think of the children! uh, I mean the men. Evidently, this woman’s husband has an eye or two for breasts. Why, church women have exposed their breasts to him millions of times!  Makes me want to reconsider Christianity. Now, where’s this church so I can go and investigate their sized DDD — Father, Son, Holy Ghost — faith?

Alexander’s post and its attendant comments are a reminder of how infantilized many Evangelical pastors, churches, and congregants have become.

Let me conclude this post with a couple of stories I think readers might find funny. In 1994, I was the co-pastor of Community Baptist Church in Elmendorf, Texas. On Wednesdays, the church gathered for prayer. Not a typical five-minute Baptist prayer meeting, but one that lasted upwards to two hours. We would sing a few songs and then get on our knees and send our prayers upwards to the ceiling God. (This was the only time women were permitted to speak during church.) Polly and I have six children. At the time, our girls were five and three. Being the daughters of fine upstanding Fundamentalists, the Gerencser girls wore dresses to church, and everywhere else, for that matter. As prayer meeting droned on, it was not uncommon for us to place the girls on the floor for a nap. One evening, a fire-breathing Calvinist — who is still a church member — came to me and said that she could see my daughters’ underwear while they were lying on the floor. She thought I would went to know so I could cover them up. Instead, her new pastor told her, don’t look. That went over well!

I had a similar experience in the 1970s while attending Sierra Vista Baptist Church in Sierra Vista, Arizona. I was eighteen at the time, and I was dating a twenty-year-old church girl named Anita. Anita irritated the hell out of then-deacon Chuck Cofty (now a Baptist evangelist) with her short skirts. One day, Cofty came up to me, filled with righteous indignation, and said, Your girlfriend’s skirt is too short and it is immodest. Cofty expected me to tell Anita to wear longer skirts. Trust me, even if I wanted to pass on Cofty’s edict — and I didn’t; I liked her skirts — Anita wasn’t the type of woman you could badger into compliance. I told Cofty the same thing I told the woman at Community Baptist, don’t look.

And here we are in 2018. I have two words for Alexander, her followers, and their menfolk, DON’T LOOK!

About Bruce Gerencser

Bruce Gerencser, 61, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 40 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.

Bruce is a local photography business owner, operating Defiance County Photo out of his home. If you live in Northwest Ohio and would like to hire Bruce, please email him.

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11 Comments

  1. Avatar
    ObstacleChick

    I am not a straight man or a lesbian, but I can’t imagine that people could be turned on watching a woman nurse a baby. I felt my unsexiest when I was nursing my kids. And yes I nursed when we went out somewhere because I didn’t want to be trapped at home for a year. I didn’t take my clothes off in public, but my thought was, if someone doesn’t like it, don’t look. Simple as that. And if some guy listed after me while I had a kid attached to my body because the kid needed to eat, that is the watcher’s problem.

    As many have discussed, making women gatekeepers partially exonerated men from responsibility for sexual assault. Putting men in charge of women and their attire puts women at risk for abuse in general. Do evangelicals really want to be like Saudi Arabia where in 2018 women are just being allowed to drive a car??? (I guess that is a rhetorical question for far right evangelicals who would rather I be locked in the house 24/7 under protection of my husband).

  2. Avatar
    Brian

    BecauseGod- Jesus has designed Christianity to help us be everything but ourselves, it makes perfect sense to completely ignore the one most important player in the game, the hungry child. Better to let that child wait to be fed than have some one-eyed dick see some female flesh! Better to shame the mother who feels naturally compelled by her motherly nature to feed her child than to allow her space and respect to do what she knows is right, feed that hungry baby. Christianity is tax-free evangelical masochism (Hurt yourself first and then preach the hurt to others.)

    • Avatar
      CM

      So it’s justified to sin because we’re honoring another commandment from God…to be fruitful? Not to focus on that fact that lust shouldn’t be for the breastfeeding woman & certainly shouldn’t be multiplying with her either. She should want to honor God by being modest & not causing brothers in Christ to be tempted. This article keeps say, “Don’t Look” but that’s with the precedent that there is something to be looking at in the first place. If they were being considerate & not selfish, to take 5 seconds to put on a cover, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Just like the little girl wearing a dress. Her parents should have had her wear appropriate shorts under her dress just incase her dress moved up.

      So you say 2 words, “Don’t Look.” I have 2 words for you as well, “Stop Selfishness.”

      • Avatar
        Astreja

        The only “appropriate” form of dress is the clothing that feels comfortable for someone to wear. it is not my duty to take responsibility for your lack of self-control – it is, and always will be, 100% on you.

      • Avatar
        Sage

        It’s so nice that it’s the woman’s fault that a man sins. Maybe, just maybe, the man should learn to control himself and not sin. I know, I know, it’s expecting to much for a poor, weak man not control his thoughts, eyes, and hands.

        I am curious, and you want to answer this carefully, is it my fault if I wear a short skirt, or leggings, or a v neck top, and when a man looks at me and lusts,, stares, or comments??

  3. Avatar
    Rachel

    Ah, this old chestnut! You have to be looking very closely indeed at a woman to know she even IS breastfeeding.

    These neurotics sexualize everything. It’s the same mentality that wants women and young girls and even female children covered up because, otherwise, “A man will lust and he won’t be able to control himself.” If a man genuinely can’t control himself, he should be locked away from society.

  4. Avatar
    Karen the rock whisperer

    I’ve never been a mom–long story there–but my husband is a Boob Guy. He married me anyhow, though I have trouble filling a B cup. But neither of us married for physical attraction, and we just had our 38th wedding anniversary. Being married or unmarried never kept him from looking, which is fine with me. We both agree that human beauty, however we define it, should be admired.

    He used to tell about a colleague he worked with at his lab assistant job when he was an undergrad. She was well-endowed, and liked tight sweaters. He was in his late teens then, and, um. distracted. He figured out ways to not work physically side-by-side with her, because he needed to not be distracted. He figured it was his problem, not hers, despite being raised in an Evangelical Christian household. This would have been in 1978 or 1979.

    Have Fundagelical Christians since then decided to not grow up, or what?

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