Something has happened to the Irish breast. You can't walk into a corner shop without seeing ever more images of its fleshy contours. It peeps at you from the middle shelves upwards, flashes itself at regular intervals, and sells magazines and newspapers faster than any other contemporary icon.
Supporters of this visual advertising argue that the images confirm our new sexual openness. But the Irish breast could be sending us a very different message. Put bluntly, we may think we're much more sexy than we really are.
The measure of this sexual stasis comes in the otherwise innocuous form of the European breastfeeding rates, which place Ireland firmly bottom of the league. The news correctly alarms public health professionals, who know that breast is best for every child. For the rest of us, the implications suggest a rather different tale. Levels of breastfeeding correlate closely to levels of sexual capacity and sensuality. If Irish women aren't doing the one, then they and their partners may be in serious trouble with the other.
Dealing with the problem is another matter. Rows about breast-feeding filled the white spaces of the so-called silly season. The yarns started first in the UK, where female journalists and readers had debated the fascism or otherwise of the so-called breast-feeding lobby, and were translated verbatim to the Irish context. The argument proposed breast-feeding as a more or less Luddite activity, designed to keep women down and stop them achieving in the career stakes.
But the factors that make Irish women the least likely in Europe to breast-feed their babies are quite different from those in play elsewhere. That uptight attitude to the body which has marked Irish culture for most of the 20th century persists in the continued reluctance to breast-feed, and to encourage it, no matter what changes have happened in work and leisure time.
So telling women about the good they do for their babies, and encouraging employers to facilitate them in the process of breast-feeding, is only one part of a public health strategy. Owning up to our collective unease with sensuality may be an issue, too.
Sexual guilt looks like a thing of the past, yet on this evidence sexual inhibitions still riddle this culture. The reflex that helps eject milk is closely related to those that release sexual feelings and bring sexual reward.
Hormones like oxytocin which help you push babies out also help you feed them, and help you enjoy your body enough to conceive them in the first place. What seems clear from these figures is that Irish women are uncomfortable having such complex, uncontrollable responses, and the wider culture backs them up.
Women who are easy with their sexuality may smile at nature's interconnected reservoirs where feelings, longings, desires and interests seem to flow from the same sources. This benefits everyone. Women whose sexual enjoyment had been limited are likely to enjoy sex more fully if they breast-feed; women who have breast-fed report better sex lives than do other women; certainly, breast-feeding encourages sexual organs to recover from birth faster.
Sensual women may laugh to find their milk letdown reflex starts to operate at the oddest moments, when they are animated, or interested in something completely different, as well as when they are sexually aroused. But these are precisely the kind of feelings and experiences that remain taboo in this country, however much more "open-minded" we are about what is put on the cornershop shelves. Anything that is made of plastic and costs us money must be better than what our bodies can do for free.
The European breast has run the full gamut of uses and abuses, from the saucy seaside postcard to Tiepolo paintings showing breast milk spurting into the sky and becoming the Milky Way; in other words, it has entered the culture on its own integrated, multi-purpose terms. In the process, national stereotypes are quaintly reinforced and allowed to grow: it's no surprise that the Swedes rate high in these stakes, as do the Danes and Dutch, all cultures reputed for their relaxed attitudes to sensuality.
Not so here. The Irish breast has never really had its day. Naked breasts were acceptable traditionally only in churches and then only as a symbol of maternal love. Walk into the National Museum in Kildare Street this week and you'll find wonderful late medieval woodcarvings of Mary and Jesus, where her breast is exposed as the gorgeous, body part it is.
But it's a much more uncomfortable image than its sister on the shelf at the corner-shop, even though the tabloid breast shares the same superficial aesthetic by mimicking breast shapes which look like they could spurt milk at any minute. Sticking with stereotypes, it seems that we can accept a Madonna, or we can accept a whore: combining the two is more uncomfortable than we seem willing to admit.
Breast-feeding needs time, and needs a mother and baby who are relaxed with each other. Tickle a baby just under its cheekbone, and you're away on a hack. Continuous breast-feeding in the absence of support structures can make you feel like a milch cow; not having the time to feed yourself properly or take extra rest won't make it any easier. The upper classes always paid someone else to suckle their babies, which for a while gave nursing mothers a social image that certainly did not help increase the rates. Few Irish people were ever all that posh.
If breast-feeding was exclusively a matter of convenience, we could have expected to see Irish men bonding with their babies through the act of feeding them more than men in other European countries, where women are more occupied with breast-feeding. This has not been the case. Fathers may be encouraged to change nappies, but that, frankly, does not rank as a bonding experience in anything like the same way.
Women have continued to monopolise the means of production, without profit-sharing in the only way that counts, getting the reward of those warm, intimate feelings that come from holding a baby close to you, looking into its eyes and giving it the comfort and sustenance it needs.
Body fluids, like bodily pleasures, are not for us. The squishy, liquid, sensual experiences that follow on from a full, lactating female breast seem too much for this culture to swallow, hence the acceptability of the breast only when dressed with a hint of lace or rubber, and presented as a lifestyle accessory or on top of a tyre manufacturer's calendar. Otherwise, they are virtually unrecognisable. In the Irish Museum of Modern Art at Kilmainham, a man asked what the smoky thing was which seemed to be shooting out of a breast on an Alanna O'Kelly video. "Milk," I replied. He was silent.