Despite the frequent indications to the contrary, we’re not living in a third world country. So I think the health advisors can take it for granted that, even if Maltese women didn’t know that breast is best to begin with, they certainly know it now. Why, then, do we have to contend with billboards of naked bosoms to which suckling infants are attached? They are only marginally less disgusting than that other billboard which confronts me each time I leave home: a giant woman’s bottom with a strip of Lycra strung between the cheeks, advertising some kind of drink. Don’t ask me what kind of drink because I can’t bring myself to look at the giant bottom for long enough – which makes it an example of failed advertising, given that it is only the buttocks which grab the attention, and not the product they are promoting.

Giant buttocks and now, giant boobs – of course, it’s become fashionable among the loud-mouthed few to suggest that mothers suckling their infants are holy and Madonna-like. They are not. Women breast-feeding their babies in public are annoying and off-putting to everyone else, except possibly the pervert behind the bush who gets a thrill out of these things. The bosoms of a breast-feeding woman are of interest only to the man she has mated with, and sometimes not even then.

Yet the relentless onslaught of propaganda, like the latest silly billboard, means that the other 95 per cent of the population who think that, like all other bodily functions involving the primary or secondary sexual organs, breast-feeding is a private activity that should not be imposed on on-lookers, are made to feel like Nazis or Victorian prudes. It is the breast-is-best campaigners who are in the wrong. Why do they think it is acceptable to plaster our highways and byways with vast expanses of naked breast with a baby clamped to the nipple? The AIDS campaigners do not adopt the similar tactic of using what the pornography industry calls a “money shot” to illustrate their calls for safe sex. They assume that, if we are old enough to have sex, then we know what sex looks like. There is unlikely to be a person alive in Malta today who does not know that human infants, like all other infant mammals, suckle milk from their mothers’ nipples. So a picture showing how it is done is really not called for. Women suckling their infants are not Madonnas. They are mammals performing a basic bodily function that should be kept private.

* * *

Somewhere, I read that Malta has an EU breast-feeding target to reach. I couldn’t believe it. Apparently, not enough Maltese women suckle their infants, lunging instead for that bottle as soon as they pop out and begin to wail. Quite frankly, I don’t blame them one bit, having done it myself – and my babies didn’t grow up to be stunted, ugly, overweight, mentally retarded or seriously unhealthy, though this is what the breast-is-best campaigners would have us believe happens to bottle-fed babies. I never believed them because I was a bottle-fed baby, too, who grew up to be the tallest, thinnest and possibly sharpest kid in the class.

While on the face of it, breast has to be best because it is nature’s tailor-made product, I can’t really see how it can overcome or undermine the power of the genes, to make us something that we would not otherwise be. Also, we really don’t have any proof that bottle-feeding causes damage or retards development, and plenty of evidence that it leaves no effect at all, except to make well-fed babies who sleep regularly and for longer and don’t drive their parents insane. Occasionally, there’s a survey result which claims that bottle-fed babies grow into shorter/fatter/less clever children (and I’m waiting for one that says it also makes them uglier), but I wonder how they work these things out. How do they know that a child would have been taller had his mother breast-fed him for four years? How do they know that he would have been cleverer or healthier? Even with a control group of breast-fed babies against the test group of bottle-fed babies, there’s no way you can factor in the genetic component. It’s our genes, and not the milk we’re fed as infants, that ultimately decide how tall, thin, clever, attractive or healthy we are as children. It’s true that better nutrition in infancy and childhood has made us taller than previous generations, but here’s the irony – previous generations were breast-fed. The bottle-fed babies of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s have been the tallest ever. They have also been the strongest, because these were the years in which the infant mortality rate plunged right down to almost zero.

* * *

Breast-feeding targets mean some very unpleasant social consequences, the most noticeable of which is the imposition of women suckling their infants on people who don’t want to be in the presence of a woman suckling her infant. To many people, me included, being around a woman who has a baby clamped to her nipple making guzzling sounds is about as comfortable as being around somebody who is sitting on a chamber-pot and straining. But we’re not allowed to say that, are we? The breast-target campaigners will jump on us at once for being silly prudes, when really all we are is normal. It is not normal for women to sit around in public with a baby dangling from their bosom, unless they are sitting on the ground outside a hut somewhere very hot.

It is because of these European breast-feeding targets that attitudes towards public suckling have been manipulated. To get more and more women suckling their infants, the campaigners knew that they would have to find some way of making breast-feeding compatible with contemporary urban life, which it is not – and which, in turn, is the reason why the vast majority of women took up the bottle from the 1960s onwards, because it set them free. This meant that the campaigners would have to get breast-feeding to mimic the convenience of bottle-feeding. If the great advantage of the bottle is that you can take it anywhere at any time without inconveniencing yourself or annoying anyone, then the same would have to be said of breast-feeding. If Mrs X could bring out her bottle in the playground, then Mrs Y could bring out her breast. This is the big lie of the boobie press-gang: breasts and bottles do not have the same public or social significance. Nobody sane can object to bottle-feeding in public, no more than they could object to somebody eating a hot dog. The same cannot be said for breast-feeding in public spaces, whether or not the breast is concealed. Lots of people object to it, and they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Recently, I read a letter in a newspaper from a woman who complained that she had been asked in some public place to go and breastfeed her baby in the lavatory. Quite right, too, lady – if you don’t like it, stay at home or use a bottle.

This is the right place to say that we do not care if the breast, nipple or both are concealed tastefully beneath the latest breast-feeding get-up from Mothercare and two dozen carefully draped pashminas. It is what is going on beneath that is irritating and off-putting. The suggestion that it is acceptable just because “nothing shows” is like saying that it is perfectly all right for people to have sex in public if they keep their private parts concealed beneath a large skirt.

* * *

The breast-is-best-gotta-reach-that-target campaigners need to learn one thing and learn it fast. If Maltese women are not breast-feeding in vast enough numbers, then it’s because they don’t want to, and not because they don’t have the right information or because they are highly irresponsible. Despite the efforts of the campaigners to claim otherwise, it is bottles that are the more convenient, and most women know this, including many of the women who breast feed. They carry on with the other option not because it is such great fun (and I am suspicious of the nature of those who behave as though it is – what a way to get your kicks) but because they have been brainwashed into thinking that they are doing something heroic and valuable for their child and for humankind. They needn’t bother. The big worry about bottle-feeding is in third world countries, where there aren’t the hygiene standards or equipment to keep gastro-enteritis at bay, or the medical treatment to deal with it when it happens. When was the last time a bottle-fed baby died of gastro-enteritis in Malta?

* * *

Now I want to see some billboards which say that it is more important to make sure that your child can read, write, add, subtract, speak English properly and say “please” and “thank you” than to breast-feed him. The irresponsible mothers are not the ones who bottle-feed their babies with powdered cow’s milk, but the ones who raise semi-literate and badly socialised children. What’s a population of breast-fed children worth if so few of them know how to behave or even how to string a sentence together?