Fun Bags, Jurisdiction Unclear

Kathryn Blundell wrote something honest in Mother & Baby and got destroyed for it. She bottle-fed her kid, admitted it openly, and gave the real reasons: she wanted wine, she wanted her body back, and she didn’t want her breasts—which had been doing a perfectly satisfying other job up until recently—suddenly reassigned to infant nutrition. They’re part of my sexuality too, she wrote. Not just breasts, but fun bags. And when you have that attitude… seeing your teeny, tiny, innocent baby latching on where only a lover has been before feels, well, a little creepy.

The outrage was immediate. Breastfeeding advocates went to war. Think pieces cascaded. She was a vain woman, a bad mother, a public health hazard in heels. The usual response to someone saying a true thing in the wrong room.

I don’t have a horse in this race—I’ve never lactated, and I intend to keep that streak going. But I’ve thought about it from my side of things. Would it bother me? The repurposing? Honestly, maybe. There’s something genuinely disorienting about the same body part holding two completely incompatible meanings at once, and the assumption that having a baby just unilaterally resolves the ambiguity in the infant’s favor. Blundell’s discomfort isn’t vanity. It’s a real psychic collision between two versions of a body, and the fact that one of those versions involves a tiny screaming person doesn’t automatically win the argument.

The health case for breastfeeding is solid and well-documented. The relentless shaming of women who don’t is equally solid and less defensible. Somewhere between those two facts is a person trying to figure out what still belongs to her after nine months of her body being available for public management and commentary. Blundell drew a line. It probably wasn’t optimal for the kid’s immune system. It was extremely honest about desire and ownership.

That one line—I wanted my body back—carries more weight than the rest of the controversy. It’s not really about wine. It’s about the assumption that motherhood is a permanent property transfer, and that any resistance to that is selfishness. She pushed back, got called selfish anyway, and wrote about it in a parenting magazine. I find that more interesting than scandalous.