In general, we live in a society in which people are free, more or less, to do what they want, provided it doesn’t impose on others to a harmful degree. Activities such as rampaging round your campus shooting at people, or flying aeroplanes into tall buildings, are seen as harmfully antisocial, and people doing such things are rightly locked up.
On the other hand, all of us would agree that there are certain things that people do in public that aren’t exactly harmful, but which some people wished they didn’t, such as
- wearing religious symbols or dress;
- wandering around with no clothes on;
- urinating;
- drinking;
- snogging;
- having sex;
- wearing very smelly cologne;
- giving a seminar on the release of calcium from intracellular stores;
- picking their noses.
Some of these activities elicit no more than a disapproving remark from passers-by. To the person extravagantly unclogging their nostrils, for example, one might volunteer to help, proffering some gothic device clearly intended for some other (but as yet undefined) purpose. Other activities in this list are probably classed as criminal offences in some circumstances (nudity, having sex in public). Others (wearing smelly cologne on trains) probably should be.
Some, though (wearing religious symbols or dress), fall into a grey area, and are currently the subject of hot legislative action.
Where, though, will it end? I was struck by this article in the Torygraph on the reactions of people to the sight of mothers breastfeeding in public. The comment thread attached to this article is instructive. I suspect that the group of people that seems to find public breastfeeding immodest overlaps with that which objects to Muslim ladies wearing the hijab, an article of dress meant to preserve modesty. Such objections are easily exposed as hypocritical.
But what of those who find public breastfeeding repellent? In my view, such objections say more about the objectors than about breastfeeding per se. Needless to say (so I’ll say it) — here’s just one of a truckload of research papers showing that breastfeeding is biologically beneficial.
Some of the respondents to the Torygraph article object to public breastfeeding as an instance of wanton exhibitionism, thinking that the sluts brazen hussies feminists women who do it are flouting a convention that nursing women should be breastfeeding their babies at home.
There, I think, is the rub. Some of the activities described above should really be done in places assigned for the purpose, for simple reasons of hygiene (urination/ defecation/changing nappies). But most of the others are carried out behind closed doors for reasons mainly of convention. In staid Britain, people having sex in the street would enrage Daily-Mail-reading bungaloid curtain-twitchers, but the rest of us would probably queue up for tickets. In Tel Aviv, the main obstacle would probably be that the couples concerned would be put off their stroke by continual interjections from passers-by remarking on deficiencies in their technique. But in some places, even holding hands in public is deeply frowned upon.
But breastfeeding? The Torygraph article cites a case in which a breastfeeding mother was warned by the police against whipping out her lactation tackle. (That this happened in South Norfolk is no surprise to this North-Norfolk resident).
Another argument, I think, that has not been explored, relates to necessity. Even if there were no other objections, is it really necessary to snog/have sex/masturbate/take your clothes off/discuss calcium release in public, when you have the choice of waiting until you could do it somewhere else more conveniently? What is offensive about such public displays is not the activities themselves, but the possibility that other people will be forced into a position where they are denied the choice of watching, or not. Snogging is great – but I hate being trapped in a train seat opposite snoggers, because I am denied the opportunity of escape (the same goes for people who wear smelly cologne). Some object to public breast-feeding on the same grounds, and demand that nursing mothers retreat to some ghastly toilet-cubicle to ply their shameful trade do what nature intended … as if breastfeeding poses a threat of contamination, like defecation. Given that there’s nothing unhygienic about breastfeeding, such demands make no sense, and, again, say more about the prurience of the complainant.
In the end, women breastfeed their babies in public because they have to. These days, women are not routinely locked up at home with small children, away from the public world of men, and have to go out to earn a living, or even (as Rigby and Peller Rowan Pelling says in her article) go to the Post Office now and then. Nursing infants cannot be expected to appreciate the prejudices of others, and, well, appointments have to be kept.
So, ladies, flop ’em out. Give suck in as ostentatious a manner as you please, and damn the torpedoes zeppelins curtain-twitchers. Do it in buses and boardrooms, offices, supermarkets, and restaurants, wherever is necessary.
From a personal perspective, I like looking at bare boobs (I’m a man: get over it). To me, the prospect of a mother in the flush of youth nursing her baby will always be life-affirming and indeed heartwarming, and people who find such a sight in any way disturbing, even shameful, have got something wrong with them.
Well said Henry. Everyone has the right to eat their lunch in public. Including babies.
On a moral, ethical, female, intellectual-whatever level, I fully support breast-feeding in public. Obviously. Though I can’t say that I would do so myself. I just don’t think I could. It just seems like such a private and personal thing to do. Then again, I am also not likely to be caught snogging, peeing, sleeping, drinking (ok, maybe drinking) in public.
I have had certain traumatic experiences involving other people’s breasts and feeding, such as watching a lady breast-feed a child (note that I write child, not baby) on the train, only to have the lunching/munching toddler ask (ask!) the mother for the other breast. People are freaky. When your kid has breast preferences, it’s time to switch the creature to burgers and fries. That was somewhat off topic, but there you go.
You’re going to hate London.
Oh please. For five years I worked in a lab across the street from Fenway Park, the glorious home of the Boston Red Sox (baseball). I was on the ground floor. So were all the drunk hobos/baseball fans who would pee on my building, while looking me full in the face, looking at them from my desk, as they peed on my building. All’s I said was that I am not likely to do it myself. As for others doing it… I think I have seen it all. Or lots of it.
I have had certain traumatic experiences involving other people’s breasts and feeding, such as watching a lady breast-feed a child (note that I write child, not baby) on the train, only to have the lunching/munching toddler ask (ask!) the mother for the other breast.
Yes, that’s … weird. Have you seen this?
Stephen Pinker wrote recently in “The New Republic” of Laurence Kass (GWBs chair of bioethics… the bioethics committee that reports to the president, but doesn’t have any scientists on it… or bioethicists) wants to ban eating ice cream in public.
Did y’all know that the USA has a Morality Council?
wants to ban eating ice cream in public.
Amazing! On what grounds? That eating a double-scoop mint-choc-chip with a flake while walking along the prom would undermine the American Way?
They’d never stand for it in Cromer.
I’ve seen letters in the Yorkshire Evening Press saying that the council should ban people from eating in public. Apparently it makes some people sick to their stomach to see other people eating their chips in the park.
This is the Nature editorial I found it from (only on the interchoobs, huh? Something Pinker must love…syntactic nonsensicles and grammatical doohickys abound).
A section from Pinker’s essay in The New Republic
“Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a “mortal danger,” he writes, in the notion “that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it.” He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone—a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. … Eating on the street—even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat—displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. … Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. … This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.
And, in 2001, this man, whose pro-death, anti-freedom views put him well outside the American mainstream, became the President’s adviser on bioethics—a position from which he convinced the president to outlaw federally funded research that used new stem-cell lines."
So, the dude’s name is Leon, not Lawrence, but this is the kind of fundamentalist, neo-con extremism that is advising our president, and helping form the Law of the Land. That scares me a great deal.
Who has their dignity offended? The child? The mother? Or the
pervertperson unable to avert their eyes?I heard on the radio a few years ago that it was offensive to eat while you were walking, because the people watching “knew that you were going to have indigestion later”.
I frequently eat and drink while walking and have not found any correlation between these activities and indigestion. It is, however, important to avoid gulping down air with each mouthful, but this is not a difficult skill to master. You can practice with a cup of tea.
Eating an icecream or carrying an open mug of coffee in public is a very effective way of reducing the likelihood that people will invade your personal space. If such things are important to you. Someone suggested that I try carrying a balloon, but I have not gotten to that yet. I am slightly afraid of bursting the balloon myself…
OMG Henry, that Little Britain sketch you posted – rather zany British sense of humour.
Breast feeding in public, I ain’t bovered.
Peeing ‘in public’ – saw someone being arrested for this in Glasgow last week. Usual on the spot fine these days. “Piece of piss” for the Copper.
Sex in public – never witnessed this myself. 2005 in my own backyard however. Not me, but a couple from the ground floor were in a certain way, engaged in having sex thus witnessed and ‘snapped’ by a neighbour. Communal back garden, broad daylight, kids around, middle of a Wed afternoon? Not in my backyard please… I ain’t no prude but WRONG
@ Anna,
When your kid has breast preferences, it’s time to switch the creature to burgers and fries.
I’ve a ten-minute bike ride home and will be chuckling all the way – priceless, thank you.
@ Ian: That Kass fellow is too much. One cannot help but see a strain of thought in American life that runs all the way back to the Winthrops of Massachusetts, the Scarlet Letter and so on.
On Eating in public – the problem, I think, is not moral, but practical. It’s the business of who clears up the mess afterwards.
On Eating in public – the problem, I think, is not moral, but practical. It’s the business of who clears up the mess afterwards.
Absolutely.
Yikes, you (as in Gee) must have now read the very small print of our (Scottish Executive) plan of recycling/blending and sending our waste down south via interchoobs using this
The Oil filter however is a most thrifty and robust piece of McCraftmanship.
So that’s what it’s for. I thought it was a lemon-squeezer.
As of this March, we now have an avaricious range of “McSmoothies”, but I must now speak to the el Chef Dept. as to what’s in there other than ‘nice chunky goodness’.
It was interesting to see which items Anna omitted from the list of things she never does in public. I think we have a case of someone here who – gasp – talks about calcium release from intercellular stores…. in PUBLIC!
checks Pubmed
hmmm…. maybe not ;)
I have breastfed in public. Discreetly. Most of us moms are not exhibitionists and are far from wanting to titillate anyone – at least at that point of satisfying your screaming progeniture. I put it almost on a par with having to blow your nose – you avert your head, or your chest, out of consideration for the rest of society and their potential objections. Thus the person who is offended by seeing you do so can then easily avert their own gaze. I would not have breastfed in public in a culture where it was absolutely unacceptable.
Ice cream is the American way of life. Okay, it also applies to a number of other countries, but still.
Eating in public, while I am not against it per se and engage in it regularly, goes to some extent hand-in-hand with eating between meals or eating on the fly. These two cultural tendencies seem to be linked to population obesity. So there may be some benefit to denying yourself until it is a mealtime or making it an exceptional way to catch your lunch, rather than a habit.
Feeding your baby, however, should be done more or less when it wants to eat. Making a six-month-old wait an hour is quite different from making a forty-year-old do the same. We do learn to delay our gratification with time, and that in itself is not harmful for adults.
I have breastfed in public. Discreetly.
I’ve been discussing this with Mrs Gee, who breastfed both Gees Minor and Minima until they started to bite back. I take your point about discretion, and indeed think that most mothers feel the same way: to the extent that there is a thriving market in clothing suitable for discreet breastfeeding – smocks with all sorts of interesting flaps and such that allow access without having to hitch everything up/off.
I never fail to be amazed by the remarkable amount of engineering design and effort expended to produce a the nursing bra, particularly the kind that allows one cup to be removed for breastfeeding access — without the whole thing going askew.
@Henry: So that’s what it’s for. I thought it was a lemon squeezer.
I must have spent too long lurking round the internest with you (either that or it’s the fumes from the gas leak in my building), but I read that as..
So that’s what it’s for. I thought it was a *demon*squeezer.
Ian, these nice men in white coats have come to take you away. Don’t struggle, now.
I don’t know about demonsqueezer, but I do know about Ghostmaker. Why? Cause I wuz in them for 3 years…
As such, shellfish plug for these Ghostmaker tracks (all free downloads):-
Proud
Out Of My Hands
Revolver
Thrive
Doing My Time
etc.
_a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. … Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. … _
I just can’t stop laughing. “Lacking utensils” seems to be the norm when it comes to eating in the US – at least the knife… and in regards to other countries (so no one feels offended) isn’t most eating of fast food/piqnique/‘public as in outside’ involving this “using the teeth tearing it off like an animal”?? We are all saavages and should know better. Only eat food proper in your own house and if you eat in public, refrain from licking the ice cream… :)
sorry, just can’t stop laughing.
I would agree with the gist of the debate about breast feeding though. Maybe not sit down in the absolute center of the square and let both the boobs fly free… but seriously, there are many ways of being descreet or just not stare, as an outsider as well.
I am more offended that women should nurse their babies in [public] restrooms. eiiyy.. talk about non hygenic for the baby, and the mother. We’re not talking about something bad here – rather the opposite. Plus the fact that one of the best cures for a screaming baby would be a little cuddle and some breast feeding and then everyone is happy, non?!
Maybe not sit down in the absolute center of the square and let both the boobs fly free…
Oh, go on. Why not?
Last I was quite amazed (not offended) to see an Indian women to breastfeed her baby at a bus stand on the ring road, here in New Delhi. Although many young Delhiites are quite progressive, you generally see only few or almost no bare shoulders, bare knees, couples walking hand in hand, hug or kiss.
As I was just passing by, I didn’t observe the reactions of the other people at the bus stand. Here in India it was a one time experience (up to now).
Public wearing religious symbols or dress, urinating, picking noses are spitting are abundant here…
@ Wouter: thanks for that interesting observation. I think that what we have here is a difference in culture. Things that are seen by some cultures as abhorrent are seen by others as entirely acceptable, and vice-versa.
Sure…! It just felt contrasting with the other general public codes.