It’s the waiter I feel sorry for. And the waiter’s supervisor. It’s anyone who sees a tiny baby doing what comes naturally and, instead of being touched for a moment by the wonder of life, gets “offended”. Louise Burns was asked to drape a napkin over her baby in Claridge’s, the London hotel, because the baby was being breastfed. She tweeted about it, and in no time many other people were “offended”, this time because a breastfeeding mother had been humiliated for attending to her infant’s needs in public.

I’m so tired of offence. It’s become a way of saying: “This has made me feel emotional in an unpleasant fashion, and I therefore condemn it.” Of course, I don’t think it’s offensive to breastfeed discreetly in public. I did it myself. That’s what you do when you’re caring for a baby: you put the baby’s needs first. But I’m not offended when other people wish to limit the ability of women to put the needs of their baby first. I’m sad.

I’m sad because this indicates that human adults persist in believing that pandering to their own tastes and preferences is more important than supporting the nurture of babies. The hostile egotism of such a credo is a miserable thing. How do we manage it? How do we move from being babies, without self-consciousness, happy to feed anywhere at any time, driven only by instinct, to being “offended” at the sight of a tiny human, who hasn’t got anywhere near there yet, being cared for on exactly those terms?

Yes, yes, Yes, I know. I’m supposed to be “offended” because of what “offence” about breastfeeding says about attitudes to women and their bodies. But, hey, who knew? What’s interesting about the persistent idea that breast-feeding should not be imposed on strangers, is that eagerness to police women is so great that babies get policed too. If men and women can’t unite to insist that babies should always come first, then what hope is there for humankind?

Of course it’s depressing, thinking about the confusion and disgust that drives people to berate women for not feeling shame or caution or “consideration for others” as they get on with the physical business of maternity. Of course it’s upsetting, thinking about the way in which opportunities are seized to make women feel that their bodies are dirty or hazardous or inappropriate, because the real and practical function of breasts ought to be hidden and their secondary function, as erogenous zones, should be an everyday aspect of consumer society. Of course it’s absurd that the public consumption of anything can be achieved using breasts, except breast milk. But in the end you just have to say: “What about the babeez?”

Because what’s really absurd is that people have so little insight that they cannot see that all of their revulsion and discomfort, embarrassment and offence, is a choice they have made – part of a set of values they accept without question, as though they are babies who are being fed thin, putrid gruel instead of mother’s milk themselves. Maybe that’s the ultimate awfulness of it all – that some adults see babies suckling at the breast of their mothers and feel nothing but a kind of angry resentment or jealousy, which they call offence.

Babies know nothing of Claridge’s, of waiters, of Twitter, of offence; and that is how we all started out. Babies know breasts only as givers of milk. The ability to take offence at the sight of breastfeeding is a thing that is taught and learned. It’s not just anti-woman; it’s anti-human.

If society as a whole cannot manage to be tender, loving and accepting to babies and to those who are doing exactly the right thing by their babies, then we may as well stop breeding. In fact, we probably ought to.

This is not a problem with a waiter, or a supervisor or a hotel: it’s a problem with society, a problem with our inability to live and let live, even when the person living is a baby and the person letting live is a mother.

Every single person who thinks they should not be exposed to the sight of breastfeeding needs to ask themselves how they got so messed up in the head, and how they can make a start on straightening their judgmental, oppressive, smutty, ungenerous and perverse little psyches out. And if they can’t do that, then they should take some kind of access course in the gentle art of looking away.