breastfeeding and the mess of opinions
So, recently, there has been a huge, viral thing going on in my country. A woman breastfed her child in a public train station and a human trashbin took a photo of her. This person posted it on the internet, shaming her for ‘indecency’ and basically invited a storm of hate threats to this innocent mother who didn’t even ask to have her photo taken.
I don’t care whether you think the act of breastfeeding without a cover is wrong, breastfeeding in public in general, or just plain breastfeeding. If you support this person, you’re gross.
Since I have no actual friends to talk about this (i’m not exaggerating) and I live most of my life online, I’m giving my opinion on the points made in the video and the points people brought up in the comments section.
I’m very liberal person. This is my opinion. It’s also my opinion that I think I’m right. It’s my blog, my domain so with the zero followers I have I think I’m not hurting anyone.
Let’s get into it.
1. “Breastfeeding in public is going to make you a victim of rape/other horrible things that people actually commented/ etc”
I don’t even wanna start about the subtle victim-shaming going on because people can do that for me. Putting in frankly, if breastfeeding makes you susceptible to rape, does not breastfeeding in public prevent you from being raped? I don’t think so, you complete trashbag.
2. “If then, that mt eveans I can walk around naked, izzit?”
You can’t compare flashing or stripping down to a child that needs to eat like everyone else. There is no comparison that can hit it close, especially when most babies don’t have any other diet but milk in the first year of their life.
When I look at the picture, I see the child who needs to be fed.
You see the tit.
That’s our difference.
3. “We must be considerate to others”
Lemme ask you a question. Why is it inconsiderate? Why do you have a problem with seeing a child being fed? Or seeing a breast? Especially when Victoria’s Secret outlets displays cleavages on five-feet tall billboards? When you see all these Instagram girls taking pictures half-naked with their breasts hanging out? Or listen to music that talks about jiggling asses?
If you have a physical response to it, that’s your problem. Do you expect people to manage you? Like the same baby you refused to let them eat?
So you saw a nipple. It’s funny how people can show how much boob they want? But nipple? Mass hysteria. Surprise, surprise. We were all born - you guessed it - naked.
Instead of asking others to be considerate, how about you be considerate for the child? At the end of the day, you’re the adult.
I’m not gonna talk about looking away or moving away or whatever, because I don’t think there’s anything wrong in the first place. But if you must, move, because most kids being breastfeed can’t even walk themselves.
Not take a picture and post in online to allow the world wide web to shame the woman. So that’s considerate, eh?
4. “There are nursing covers.”
Please eat under a blanket from now on and tell me how that feels a year later.
If they forgot the nursing cover, by your logic, the child must starve?
I’m not shaming anyone who choses to be ‘modest’, but if a woman needs to feed with a cover, it’d better be because of her own reasons and her own will and what she finds most comfortable.
Not out of shame.
Definitely not to appease people that can’t see a tit without making it viral.
5. “We must see things objectively....”
I saw a video on Youtube by a professional Youtube channel. that debated about this picture, and one guy, who raised excellent points, by the way, was shamed by netizens because he was too ‘rude’ and ‘opinionated’ and ‘didn’t see things objectively’
I applaud this man. He made the same points, but that was because he was confident. He was confident in what he saw, he was confident in what the principle of this fear of breastfeeding is and he didn’t compromise because he didn’t give up his integrity for the sake of looking ‘friendly’.
People said he repeated the same points, but that was it. That was the point he needed to make. That was the best point he could make and he boiled it down to the essence of xenophobia. He wasn’t pulling tricks from his sleeve. Once you hit a rock, you can’t continue digging.
One good reason is better than a collection of lackluster, lukewarm reasons.
They applauded the people who were ‘discursive’ and ‘open-minded’. Do I need to remind you he took only one valid point to make them reflect on their ideals? If that’s bad debating, I don’t know what is.
This my theory as to why the opposing side actually ended up listening to his points.
Boiled down to the essence, there is nothing wrong with feeding a child and other couldn’t understand why they didn’t enjoy it either. This was it was easy for them to agree with the opposing side while hiding behind their stance too.
I’m not saying there is something wrong agreeing with your opponent. I respect people who can do that, but there is a difference in doing it because you understand their point of view and doing it because you don’t really understand your own point of view, deep down inside.
In this case, what I saw (maybe I’m wrong) was weakness.
6. “we’re not ready for this yet. society must take time to progress.”
This is one point raised in the video which I disagree. Decisive action is decisive action. What does that even mean? I can show one quarter of a breast in this era? Then the next generation can show half a breast? Only my granddaughters are ‘advanced’ enough to show their full mammary organs when feeding a child.
Take US LGBT marriage rights. The movement started with some states allowing same-sex marriage. Did it end that way? No, it didn’t. It ended with the whole of America allowing same-sex marriage. They didn’t repeat that shit for 50 times.
7. “the best solution to this is a compromise”
I don’t think so. Compromises never get people everywhere but merely keeps peace - firm, decisive action did. Ever heard of the phrase ‘you can’t have peace without a war?’ or studied on the compromise of the Versailles Treaty being the main reason for World War Two and why Hitler came into power? Neither do laws let room for ‘grey areas’. You’re either with it against it. Being ‘conflicted’ is already a sign that you find something wrong with something that isn’t wrong. I’m not saying you must have a firm opinion towards everything in life, but this is literally the act of feeding a child. It’s a human right. How can you have a divided opinion about something like that?
If there’s something twisted about people’s mindsets, there is something wrong.. It needs to be corrected. I don’t understand how there is a grey area or why people support the presence grey area??? Either people can breastfeed their child how they like or they can’t.
Put in this way, if I was talking about LGBT rights, can I compromise that? What is a compromise? Some people can marry and some can’t? Either everyone is allowed or they’re not.
As I saw on one Tumblr post which I can’t find, I’ll paraphrase this. “The nicest people were the ones that caused the most suffering’ - because they didn’t take action. They felt that it was okay. They waved it off as something pointless and trivial.
Change starts from us. Especially when most people can’t even explain why they feel that women shouldn’t breastfeed in public. All they can do is point and yell ‘immodest’ without even being able to explain why it’s ‘immodest’. It’s the same thing with homophobia; they don’t know why they don’t like it, just that they don’t like it.
Okay, I have to study, like really. I have no intentions of becoming a certain blogger that badmouths about everyone. There will be no summary because it will be fifteen pages long.
It’s not wrong.
It never was.
Check yourself.
-graphite
i hate colouring???
As a child, I can honestly tell you that I absolutely hated colouring. It remains true to this day. I’m only really colouring for the sake of giving colour so that my crappish drawings don’t remain in a black-white world. That, and maybe because there are so much things one can do with colour. *uninformed and un-ignorant*
Anyway, being the unconventional special snowflake child I am to this day, I was overjoyed every time my German relative returned to visit me with an armful of drawing fashion books. I literally lived for those - even if I didn’t get nearly close to the beautiful samples in the book. I just drew everything in with a pencil and moved onto the next model. no i didnt feel bad, yes i tried and i have justification for it.
1. my colouring pencils were c to the r to the a to the p. i was not artistically inclined enough to spend a fortune on colouring pencils, and they would always break (yay for digital art!) either by force or by horrible sharpeners. Honestly, this isn’t actually a plausible excuse especially when you see what masterpieces primary school kids can create out of a value pack of crayons
2. i have trouble with black and white shading, let alone with the full spectrum of colours. to this day, i don’t understand how shading works and i probably never will. whoops.
3. there are too many rules! thou shall not colour outside the lines! thou shall colour accordingly to what colour the object typical looks like! thou shall colour in one direction and one only! not to mention you can’t even erase that shit if you mess up
4. i don’t have the patience for it. my mind is too vivid and overactive to waste the time in my quickly deteriorating life trying to fill some area with this thing instead of moving onto some other crucial/non crucial detail that would take actual patience and focus to perfect instead of just colouring over some big blob of empty space
5. colour pencils never fill completely (if not digital art) and I DON’T HAVE THE PATIENCE
Am I alone in this?
-graphite
PS: I SEE YOU ADULT COLOURING BOOKS. I SEE YOU’RE PRETTY AND INTRICATE AND LOVELY BUT I WOULD RATHER RIP MY HAIR OUT HAIR OUT AND REPLACE THEM AS PAINTBRUSHES THAN EVER FIND SHADING IN MANDALAS RELAXING.