Strip down. Skin a cat. Take it off. Most of us would probably only get naked in public if we were running from Curtiss to Beardshear at midnight. Or posing for an art class. Or in the middle of a nude beach. But those are places where you know people are going to be naked before you even get there.

And none of those things take place in Stephens Auditorium. So imagine my surprise when I went to the fashion show last week, and it seemed I had wandered into a low-budget “Girls Gone Wild” video.

“Here’s my boobs!”

Well, the woman a couple of rows in front of me wouldn’t have been lying if she’d said that. Except, unlike the gone-wild girls, she had a baby attached to her exposed breast.

I had no idea I was paying to see this secondary show.

Let’s examine why we bother keeping our clothes on. One, it’s illegal not to. Except maybe at four in the morning in some small town 50 miles away. Two, we have some decency left. Maybe.

So, let me get this straight. If you expose your breasts, penis or other genital paraphernalia in public, that’s illegal and disgusting. If you whip out your knocker and let someone under the age of 2 suck on it, it’s endearing and a perfectly legal practice.

I understand that baby’s gotta eat. And baby may get hungry at Wal-Mart, Red Lobster, on CyRide, etc. But there are ways to get around that. And I would like to keep my appetite as well.

The Female Intelligence Agency’s Web site cites a case, and others like it, where a woman was breastfeeding her infant at an Applebee’s. The manager asked her to please refrain because it was “indecent.”

They think this is some horrible thing. But the manager probably asked her to stop because he or she had been getting complaints from customers who were tired of watching while they were trying to eat. I don’t think I would be able to stomach that, either.

The least you could do is to throw a blanket over yourself.

The Female Intelligence Agency also notes that it’s OK “if your nipple shows for a LITTLE while getting baby on breast. [sic]” Yeah, Janet Jackson tried showing her nipple for a LITTLE while at the Super Bowl a few years back. It was not OK. I guess it’s because nothing was slobbering on it.

Please, ladies, figure out a way to feed your baby that doesn’t include exposing yourself. At least until public indecency is OK for everyone else, too.

– Bailey Lewis is a sophomore in English from Indianola.