What We See When We See a Model Breastfeeding

Then there was Nicole Trufino, appearing on the cover of Australian Elle in 2015, a bit more forthright about the artifice, writing on her Instagram: “I obviously don’t look like this or wear [this] while I am breastfeeding.” But it’s not just the unreachable aesthetics that these images represent—hey now, I’m aware that I work at a fashion magazine—it’s that I’m not sure these do a whole lot. Or rather that we, in general, (forgive me) as a society, do enough. 

What does it look like to be a breast or bottle-feeding mother in America right now? If you’re working outside the home, it can look like a dingy windowless pumping room that may or may not have been tidied since before the pandemic. (And by the way, many employers didn’t have to provide this kind of space until fairly late last year, when President Biden signed into law the PUMP Act, which makes nursing and pumping accommodations more mandatory on a federal level.) It can look like last year’s national formula shortage, which left many parents in an utterly desperate state as they scoured store upon store for basic (and, you know, life-sustaining) formulas or reverted to the black market. It looks like the mother’s room at the gorgeous new Moynihan Train Hall, which I realized, once I tracked someone down to unlock it for me, didn’t have anywhere to sit. I guarantee you, no woman who has ever nursed a baby approved the design of a mother’s room without a chair. (This was last summer and, I hope, a temporary error.) Baby on hip, we marched back out the waiting room and nursed under the train timetables. It was nicer that way, anyway. 

I want to stress that it’s not the shot of Maurer that is needling me. In the end, I think that image is fantastic. I may smear some glittery face paint on the next time I have to feed the baby to add a little couture sparkle to what is a sometimes wonderful, sometimes mundane activity in my day. But I don’t think it’s #momgoals, either. I think breastfeeding mom goals are having to deal with fewer indignities and difficulties that often surround feeding your baby. I think it looks like a truly wide array of images when you search “breastfeeding mother” on Getty, not just a collage of Hallmark Channel stills.