Controversy over Angelina Jolie’s Breastfeeding Picture
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The November cover of W magazine shows a picture taken by Brad Pitt of Angelina Jolie breastfeeding one of their twins. Take a moment to vote in the poll that asks whether the breastfeeding picture is “Gorgeous” “OK” or “Gross.” I’m sure you can guess where I land on the matter. To me she’s never looked more beautiful or natural!
La Leche League spokeswoman Jane Crouse applauded Angelina:
Breast-feeding in public reveals a whole lot less than what has been revealed on the red carpet. … I think we do need more role models like Angelina Jolie willing to be photographed and say, ‘Hey look, it can be done, it oughta be done.
I applaud her too! Not only is she breastfeeding twins, she’s also willing to talk about it and share such a lovely picture. How precious are those tiny fingers at the breast?!
When Jolie came into the Four Seasons, she looked around quickly, then crossed the floor like a pilgrim, with her head down, like someone used to being noticed, or bothered, like someone who does not feel safe. As T. S. Eliot wrote, “The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.” She went through the lobby the way a shark goes through the ocean, quickly and smoothly. You detect her presence not by her face, which she can obscure or render ordinary in that way of celebrities, but by how people around her react—the flurry in the water. She carries herself with strange dignity, as if she were an emissary of a secret order, a messenger from a lost kingdom. You see it in every picture. Shot after shot. She’s a princess, an aristocrat. I mean, the woman knows how to be photographed, where to look, where the light comes from. (Us says they’re just like us, but Us is wrong about them, or wrong about us.) She’s not quite flawless in person—she’s more real, human. It’s the same product, only it’s been taken out of bunting and plastic and set in this ordinary place, as opposed to the dreamworld cooked up by set designers and admen.
We sat near a wall of windows in the back of the hotel restaurant. As we talked, people circled around her as debris orbits a planet. This is called gravity. She wore a silky maternity dress under a blue blazer, the sort worn by stand-up comics, and Frankenstein. After a while, she took off the jacket, and there were her arms with their hieroglyphic tattoos, each telling another story, another legend from her already legendary life: wild teen years, marriage to actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton.
“How pregnant are you?,” I asked.
“I don’t want to say,” she said, smiling sadly. “A few months. I only know, if I do say, people will start stressing on our due date.”
When Pitt or Jolie shoots a film (they never work at the same time; there is always a parent around), the entire family goes along, bringing familiar things from home—though there is no home—in an attempt to re-create the world as it existed in the last place, and in this way they give their children a semblance of normalcy, routine.