If Nigel Farage is reading this, I tried “ostentatious breastfeeding” once. It didn’t go well – the baby kept knocking off the nipple tassels. It was also difficult to hang on to the baby as I cartwheeled across a crowded restaurant, finishing by doing the splits on top of someone else’s table, with a booming cry of: “And that, my friends, is how breastfeeding is done!”
Except, it isn’t. Taking a wild guess, I’d say that no one in the long human history of lactation has ever breastfed like that or, indeed, so “ostentatiously” that they needed to be led to a corner to sit in wretched penance, like a beaten dog that had just soiled a new rug.
As you may be aware, “sitting in a corner” was Farage’s suggestion for how public breastfeeding should be dealt with, but there are other methods. When nursing mother Louise Burns sat quietly with her top discreetly arranged so that her baby could feed, Claridge’s made her wear a large white cloth, draped over the offending infant and the non-visible mammary, in the manner of a scaled-down police incident tent in a TV murder drama.
Before we go on, I’m no breastfeeding evangelist. There have been times when I’ve felt irritated by the Breastfeeding Mafia – only a tiny section of breastfeeders, but with enough sway to make bottle-feeding mothers feel like shamed failures or reprobates.
If I’m evangelical about anything, it’s that most mothers do their best automatically and should not be judged for any decision they make regarding the nourishing of their children.
That said, looking at photos of Ms Burns, it’s laughable how much more noticeable, dare I say “ostentatious”, she looked with the cloth on than she’d previously been with it off. What wasn’t funny was how she’d been publicly humiliated. Which is probably why the campaign group Free to Feed made a decision to stage a “nurse-in” outside Claridge’s in protest.
This is not just about breastfeeding, it’s about women’s bodies in general. And about who feels entitled to look at them, comment upon or judge them for what they are, or what they’re doing, at any time, in any state, for any reason. Where public breastfeeding is concerned, it should be about other people resisting the urge to control nursing mothers and instead learning to control their own behaviour, in particular their need to gawp.
Claridge’s and Farage don’t seem to understand that breastfeeding is a woman’s own business; it remains an entirely private matter, even in a public space.
Happily, breastfeeders tend to be human-size – they don’t fill entire rooms or eclipse suns. Even in a crowded restaurant, it’s fairly easy not to look at a woman breastfeeding and to gaze elsewhere. Thus, if someone chooses to stare and becomes offended, isn’t that their own doing and their own fault?
People who drone: “It’s not about the breastfeeding, it’s the breast” need to resit their biology exams. This is how breastfeeding is done, there’s no other way. It’s unreasonable to expect the female sex to apologise for the plumbing nature gave them – for not being able to make the milk conveniently spurt out of, say, the end of their index finger.
The fact remains that even the most competitive breastfeeders (and they do exist) would balk at actively demanding a stranger’s attention. They are nursing mums, not flashers using their child as some kind of sick alibi. Thus it’s those who gawp, not the gawped at, who are responsible for the unprompted, unwanted attention – and who then have the gall to petulantly claim victimhood. Perhaps it’s these people who need to stop ostentatiously staring and to be made to sit quietly in a corner, until the urge to gawp passes. If all else fails, they could always be put under a cloth.
Oh yawn… the spectre of James Bond looms again
The launch of the new James Bond film Spectre made me shudder in advance about having Bond forced upon us for the foreseeable. There was the usual cringeworthy guff about “Bond girls” – as if grown women should be grateful to be infantilised.
Alongside Lea Seydoux, there’s Monica Bellucci, who’s committed the unpardonable sin of being 50, making her neither nubile nor Judi Dench. Unimaginable! One can only hope that Bellucci is either shot or eaten by a shark in the opening credits, thus ensuring that the Bond credo remains unsullied by older female flesh.
Then again, would it do Bond any harm to have an age-appropriate woman around? Someone to stop our hero being the ultimate toxic bachelor, looking increasingly ridiculous as he tarts around foreign climes, because, hey baby, he’s an international spy, into guns, ladeez, fast motors and penis-extension yachts.
Basically, 007 is tragic – the encapsulation of how male wish-fulfilment can go horribly wrong. Yet we’re told that men continue to look up to Bond as a role model. Men, tell us it ain’t so. You deserve better and I don’t say that every day.
At last – Chris Grayling’s brought to book
How wonderful to hear the high court declare that the ban on sending books to prisoners in England was unlawful. All those opposing the ban, including the Howard League for Penal Reform and prominent writers such as Carol Ann Duffy and Salman Rushdie, are jubilant, while the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, looks like a prize idiot.
Lest we forget, the feeble reasons given for introducing the ban included that there were already prison libraries for prisoners to use and that books sent from the outside could be used for smuggling drugs and extremist materials into prison.
However, access to prison libraries seems restricted at best, as does the selection of books available. Nor are books uniquely placed for smuggling contraband into prison. Grayling entered into risible “file baked in cake” territory here. Items such as drugs and extremist materials would be entering prisons through various routes and books would be just one of them.
What seems more likely is that a certain justice secretary wanted to be seen as a big, tough lad, presuming that the public would be behind him, giving the prisoners a hard time, making sure they realised that crime didn’t pay, that prison was no holiday camp and all the usual rightwing bunkum.
Well, Grayling miscalculated. People weren’t impressed by the sheer pointless malice of the move. Prisoners already have a difficult route to rehabilitation, just as prison staff face an uphill battle trying to provide it. Adding a random ban on books from the outside was beyond farcical.
What would this do but further dehumanise prisoners, forcing their sense of possibilities to shrink even more, in the most crass and inhumane way possible? It serves Grayling right that he now looks ridiculous, vindictive and ineffective.
