BUSTING OUT Show us your teats BY MARY ANN SORRENTINO

The "lactivists" — activists advocating for a woman’s right to nurse her infant discreetly in public — are out in full force following lisp diva Barbara Walter’s admission that she was "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 annoyed 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 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 Super Bowl malfunction mammaries? Or is it just that Walters, like too many Americans, rejects the functional breast in favor of the recreational breast? I believe that Walters and her discomfited peers equate breast-feeding with other "unclean" bodily functions better done in private.

It’s funny how a nation that glorifies breast implants, glamorizes topless dancers, and allows its teenagers to go to school barely dressed on hot spring days gets all in a twitter over breastfeeding. America sees more exposed or quasi-exposed breasts than nursing mothers ever flashed. Quite simply, a bare breast sighting is not the same, after all, as witnessing public urination, defecation, or sexual intercourse.

It’s about time America got over its love-hate relationship with mammary glands. Breasts are either always acceptable or never acceptable. It makes no sense to say breasts are for viewing, but not if they are viewed in the act of feeding babies — their raison d’etre.

I think this is the real problem: Americans either don’t know or don’t accept what breasts were really meant to do. They were not invented as a favored sexual toy. They are simply the interesting human packaging, if you will, housing the mechanics for milk delivery.

A few years ago, Jennifer Lopez appeared on TV in a gown that basically consisted of two swaths of chiffon descending from her shoulders to barely cover her nipples. It gathered slightly at the waist, front and back, to again barely cover her crotch and the line of demarcation on her derriere. No one got "uncomfortable" — least of all Walters. Yet the same men and women who found and find commercial mammillaria 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, and toddlers may run into the surf buck naked.

At times, mothers may also choose to nurse their children within your view. It is not obscene, and it is not about you — or Barbara Walters. Just get over it.