‘Warning: breastfeeding may lead to cracked and sore nipples and make you feel like a cow. In rare cases, it may also turn you into an unwilling porn star’.
That’s something you’re unlikely to find in a brochure from the Breastfeeding Association, but which New Jersey mother MaryAnn Sahoury found out the hard way when she consented to make an instructional video about breastfeeding for a US website.
Sahoury made the video for Parent TV, a site run by Meredith Corp, the US publisher of such family-friendly titles like Better Homes and Garden, Family Circle and Quilting. Sahoury was told that the video would only appear on the website and on cable channels and duly signed the release forms.
Unfortunately, she didn’t read the fine print, since she was juggling a baby at the time, and did not realise she had agreed to a full release for the video.
Sahoury later Googled herself to discover that some of the breastfeeding video had been spliced into footage of a similar-looking woman performing sex acts. The footage had been posted to YouTube and then shared on pornographic websites.
According to Sahoury, the good folk at Meredith had promised only first names would be used, but it later emerged both her and her baby’s full names were released and subsequently used in the pornos.
The revelation that breastfeeding is a fetish and porn sites are full of both men and women guzzling breast milk came as a surprise to me. Although, I really shouldn’t be so shocked. After all, this is just one more example of how something that can be painful or unpleasant for women, or at best, an intimate experience that doesn’t involve men, can be reduced to a man-pleasing smutfest simply by adding some strobe lighting and a sound track of fake orgasms.
No doubt some will say that I’m just being prudish. If it’s all between consenting adults then who am I to call them weirdo freaks with mummy issues?
But the problem is that this isn’t between consenting adults. Sahoury didn’t give her explicit consent for the video to be used in the way it was online.
You might argue that Sahoury was careless in not reading the details. But I challenge any sleep-deprived new mother with a one month old to fully read and comprehend fine print. Reading Where is the Green Sheep? is about all many mothers are up to.
And would it really have protected her, anyway? After all, once something is online, it can be re-fashioned and re-purposed by anyone with the skills and inclination.
You could say that Meredith is at fault. They haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory, absolving themselves of responsibility by helpfully pointing out ‘Ms Sahoury signed a release authorising use of the video across all media platforms, and holding Meredith harmless for any potential misuse of the video by a third party.’ So that’s all ok then.
The real fault is at the hands of the people who turned the sacred act of breastfeeding into smut, and the wankers who think that it’s appropriate to jerk off to a video of a mother and her child.
Sahoury is taking legal action against Meredith, but that won’t undo the damage that has been done. Internet content lives forever and she and her child will always be the stars of a porno.
The Sahoury family isn’t the only ones poorer for the army of online tossers who have viewed the video. It may mean that women will now be reluctant to participate in instructional videos and share their valuable experience about breastfeeding, birthing, or any other intimate experience.
And in that case, we all lose.
Kasey Edwards is the author of Thirty Something and The Clock is Ticking: What Happens When You Can No Longer Ignore The Baby Question (Random House). www.kaseyedwards.com
