I lactated in a bathroom only once. It was a cross-country flight. My breasts, engorged after a long security line, could no longer wait. Watching myself in the mirror, I can recall thinking, Is this funny or just sad? When the turbulence came, I had one hand on a breast and another on the pump. Milk spilled. A comedy of errors, save for one thing: My baby son was on board, so what was I doing in the bathroom when I could have been breastfeeding him in my seat?

Another bathroom stall, another mother. This time she’s sitting on a toilet; a baby, latched and suckling, is in her arms. This is not Botticelli’s nursing Madonna. It’s all harsh fluorescent lights and grimy tile floors. “Would you eat here?” the ad asks. Or: “Table for two.” Criticized as obscene, the campaign—created by two University of North Texas students to promote a stalled Texas bill that would protect a woman’s right to breastfeed openly in public—unleashed yet another round of commentary about the “appropriate” place of nursing in public spaces.

Substance of the debate aside, the controversy raises important questions about how we talk about (and depict) public breastfeeding. Laws have had limited effect in changing regressive attitudes about public nursing. Perhaps commerce—and advertising—is where we need to change first.

The nursing-mom-harassed-in-public story—police officer tells nursing mom to cover up, nursing mom in Texas Victoria’s Secret told to go to an alley, nursing mom on American Airline’s flight given a blanket—is so frequent, it can’t be excused away as benign prudishness.

Look no farther than the images of hyper-sexualized breasts that bombard us at every turn. The sexual breast sells everything from beer to cars to cologne. It dominates advertising. We have “breastaurants.” Yet this persistent objectification of women in advertising and commerce is rarely decried as obscene; ogling breasts, after all, is considered normal male behavior. So why is the maternal breast—when it appears in public for some purpose other than the male gaze—still jolting and scandalous?