E-Mail This Article to a Friend BUSTING OUT Show us your teats BY MARY ANN SORRENTINO

The "lactivists" — activists advocating women’s right to nurse infants discreetly in public — are out in full force following Barbara Walters’s admission, on the May 17 episode of The View, that she felt "uncomfortable" sitting next to a nursing mother on a recent airplane ride.

This woman, so "uncomfortable" with the sight of a nursing breast, is routinely photographed at glamorous Hollywood and New York parties where bare-breasted and butt-exposing celebs are the norm. So what disturbed her, exactly?

Was it the little one’s head covering its mother’s breast? Was it that sucking sound or those tiny purring noises of contentment? Was it that the nursing mother’s breast just your average generic nursing breast, as opposed to one of Pam Anderson’s reconstructed jugs or Janet Jackson’s exposed-by-malfunction mammaries? Or is it just that Walters, like too many Americans, rejects the functional breast in favor of the recreational breast?

A few years ago, Jennifer Lopez appeared at the televised Grammy Awards in a gown of loosely pinned chiffon that exposed her torso to the navel, barely covering her nipples. The fabric gathered slightly at the waist, front and back, to give minimal cover to her crotch and the line of demarcation on her derriere. No one got "uncomfortable" — including, as far as we know, Walters. Yet the same men and women who find commercialized mammaries worth watching cringe at a nursing mother reaching inside her blouse and lifting out a handkerchief- or bandanna-draped breast to feed a hungry baby.

Spontaneous body events sometimes happen in public because nature isn’t always predictable. Kids soil their diapers, adults occasionally cut wayward wind, men scratch their privates or make logistical adjustments in that vicinity, toddlers run into the surf buck naked.

And yes, at times mothers choose to nurse their children within view of others. It is not obscene, and it is not about you — or Barbara Walters. Just get over it.