I find public breastfeeding electric. Not sexual, but charged up. One minute I’m pecking on my laptop, drilling coffee, when some new mother whips her tit out at the table next to me and smashes her baby's face into it. It’s ridiculous to pretend like it’s not happening. It’s the equivalent of a hairy, sweaty man walking around the neighborhood shirtless; women can’t look away. It’s not sexual, but it’s not nothing, either. It’s undeniably there, begging to be commented on.
I’ve never had a problem taking my shirt off in public: parks, boardwalks, basketball courts (yeah, I ball bruh…), and on the stoop. It’s not because I’m an Adonis; some days it’s just too hot to keep it on. But maybe that is because I am slathered in dark, thick hair? My shoulders, my chest, my stomach. Everything connects. I’m hirsute. Maybe that’s off-putting? The first time I considered that my body might be offensive was a few years ago, when a group of small children heckled me outside a church in Bed-Stuy. I was shirtless on my bike, stopped at a red light, deep inside my phone, not realizing they were pointing and laughing at me. AH GROSS! SO HAIRY! EWWWW. I shrugged it off to kids being kids. But those memories bubbled up again the other day, after a shirtless run through Prospect Park with a friend, when a couple of moms grimaced at us near the water fountain. Was it me?
My running partner, a hairless Brooklynite, said it’s male privilege: the ability to walk freely in public without a shirt and not be whistled at. When a woman disrobes in public, she can expect to be sexualized. Men, meanwhile, can flash as much torso as they like with no real consequence. I had, predictably, never considered this. Still, I wonder if body hair is the real offense. Is a smooth chest more socially palatable? Is it the ragged tangle of chest pubes that triggers ire?Â
I thought about the time my brother, Ephraim (a hirsute eighteen year old with advanced back hair) and I showed up to a Colorado country club for a high school graduation pool party. People were aghast. (It’s no wonder there were no Jewish members.) At sixteen, I was a genetic anomaly; no armpit hair, very little muscle but somehow a strip of dark jet black hair resembling a skidmark in the center of an oddly advanced barrel chest. We were without a doubt the only Semites in a sea of highly developed, tanned Aryans. The subtle glances we received were more of wonderment and fascination at our physical proportions than disgust. It’s all about context. The pool should be a safe space.Â
In Brooklyn, guys like
, a hairy, literary, anxious type who rarely goes shirtless in public, says it’s an American hang-up. In France, you’ve got topless women and men who look like Roman Polanski dunked in superglue and rolled in rug lint. No one flinches. Crickets. It’s normal. But then again, some Parisians, like Elinor Weil, say that in Paris, going shirtless or even wearing workout gear is déclassé. Even if you’re attractive, it’s in poor taste. But if you're fat, it’s horrifying.In my younger days, I went to Paris hoping to find the sort of loose, bohemian Serge Gainsbourg level of body hair acceptance that would make a guy like me attractive to women I could never dream of bedding in New York. And while it is perhaps slightly more acceptable for men to be looser in their manscaping, Saint Germain-des-Pres isn’t lined with female strutter-bys itching to hitch a ride on a short flabby hornball. Gay Paree isn’t the shoulder-hair obsessed hooter gala men dreamed of as adolescents. It turns out that even in Paris, shirtless men in public are gross to most and titillating to only a few.Â
Still, there are those who embrace the shirtless life, and ignore the scowls. Look at
New York’s horniest poet. He runs through the park topless and doesn’t give a shit who doesn’t like it. He’s in great shape, which helps. For him it’s a rush. It’s freedom. It’s Playgirl in the flesh. It’s performance. It’s erotica.ÂBut there’s no female equivalent for men seeking validation in the court of public torso-ing. Just because a woman has a great rack doesn’t mean she wants stares while breastfeeding. Starr might be doing performance art; a mother is doing survival.
And then there are the purists, like
, whose underarms are covered in foliage, who believe no nipple should be freed without consent, unless, of course, it’s for breastfeeding. Maybe the exposed male nipple is like farting in an elevator or taking off your shoes on a plane. There’s a tacit agreement not to do it. And while I get that trapping people inside your colon on the ride up the Empire State Building is in poor taste (and possibly a bioethical hazard), no one’s forcing anyone to stare at a sweaty man stretching his hips in the park.But still, I’d like to believe that for every woman who scowls at a shirtless guy, there’s another who finds it erotic. I have yet to find one.Â
The bigger question here is: what is the point of a public space? What are the rules? Should there be a shirtless only area in Central Park? A breastfeeding zone in the coffee shop?Â
Probably not.Â
The answer here is simple: only stare a little bit at women breastfeeding in public, and for women, smile at the sexy shirtless men and scowl at the gross hairy ones. That’s the contract.Â
Tanning hairily in a suburban backyard as I read this, hoping nobody can see me.
I’m pretty sure it just comes down to a sort of unselfconscious self-acceptance to pull it off, for men and women. I’m not there yet.
"skidmark" thankfully bukowski is dead