Catching you up to speed

I suspect Heather W. over at Better Homes and Garden (bhg.com) is going to have an interesting day today. She may be hailed as having touched a nerve and gotten a monster comments thread going or she may be doing damage control. You see, she wrote a little piece called The 10 commandments of dining with little kids that went up over at Shine from Yahoo (pay attention – that’s important for later). In the article she tells us she’s not a child-hater (really!) and then she and bhg.com proceed to gift parents with a nifty little 10 point list detailing how to keep our obnoxious offspring from ruining someone else’s great night out at the restaurant. The list comes complete with recipes kids will love tailored to each point. The whole article is problematic, but the tip that is getting the most attention is #4 “Thou Shalt Not Breast Feed At The Table”. Her solution for mamas with hungry children? She puts on her crossing guard vest and cap to direct us to the lavatory.

Thou Shalt Not Breast Feed At The Table

Public Toilet by catalina77 @ www.sxc.hu

The reception to Tip #4 was what you would expect. It was deemed a failure by many and a whole lot of lactivism started happening. Great  YouTube videos advocating for the normalization of breastfeeding in public (in part by not telling people to breastfeed in a bathroom) are being passed around and sent to BHG in an effort to help them understand the magnitude of their misstep. People are writing in to BHG to tell them how disappointed they are to see writing like this associated with a product they’ve bought in the past. BHG is being reminded that a public restroom is not a sanitary location for feeding a baby. Even a clean restroom can contain E. coli, salmonella, coliform, rotavirus, cold virus and the form of staph known as MRSA. Restrooms are as unsuitable a place for a baby as they are for another adult or child to eat their meal in. BHG is being reminded that Heather’s suggestion flies in the face of the laws enacted in 47 US states to protect breastfeeding mothers and their children. Sadly, Tip #4 is an example of why these laws needed to be passed in the first place.

Breastfeeding supporters and advocates push back on the types of attitudes exposed by this article in our efforts to normalize breastfeeding. Mothers are told they’ll be more comfortable somewhere more private. They’re told we are making other people uncomfortable and “offending”. They’re are accused of being hard-line lactivists with an ax to grind as they attempt to mind their own business and feed their child. People do it in person and in print. They do it in straight-forward ways as well as the round-about tips shared as “Thou Shalts”.

Thou Shalt Show Your Adult Privilege

Adult privilege is out for show-and-tell in this article. The majority of all articles that start with some version of “I am not anti-kid” are going to go on to detail exactly how the author *is* anti-kid and what they want parents to do to get kids out of the public sphere. This article lands squarely in that majority and is just the most recent attempt to discipline parents mothers through their children. Renee at Womanist Musing wrote about this in My Child Takes Up Space and I highly recommend the article and comments.

Then we get to the recipes at the end of each section. For me they are an awkward attempt to tie in content. I mean, the “Thou Shalts” are talking about how to wrangle kids out in a public restaurant’s seating area and not in the commercial kitchen. I can almost see how someone could torture the concept to look like restaurant=kitchen=recipe=BHG content. The thing is – I read them as a consistent recommendation not to even take the kids out. What those recipes said to me as I read the article was “Better yet – STAY HOME and feed your kids there so we won’t be inconvenienced by them.”

So What Happened?

Nothing much at first. More than 24 hours went by before the first comment was posted and we all know that’s like…. a decade in internet-dog years. That didn’t last. People finally began noticing, sharing the link, and getting upset.

People are now calling to have Ms. Heather W fired. (I think retracting the article would be in order) People are writing in to BHG and telling them how upset they are. They are telling her and BHG off in many colorful ways. There’s already a BHG Boycott page up on Facebook and the #boycottBHG hash tag. The interestingly cool thing for me is that people are not only showing their displeasure with their tweets. They are voting with their wallets. They are canceling their subscriptions to not only Better Homes and Gardens but other magazines owned by the BHG parent company including Parents, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, etc. It’s not just the discrete brand experiencing fall-out but the parent company Meredith International.

Here’s a list of all the magazines currently published by Meredith.

What’s Not Happening

As far as I can tell, Yahoo is not on the receiving end of any blowback from the article. There’s no comparable Boycott Shine at Yahoo page up at Facebook and a Twitter searches of Yahoo and boycott didn’t net me anything interesting related to breastfeeding. I’m very interested in why that might be since Shine at Yahoo is where the article is located. Does anyone have any ideas about why BHG is the focus of so much ire while Yahoo (which to my mind would be equally at fault here) is getting off at the moment?

You Want to Do Something?

Sharing with BHG and Shine at Yahoo

If you’d like to share your thoughts with Better Homes & Gardens you can do it here.

BHG.com
Meredith Corporation
1716 Locust Street.
Des Moines, IA 50309-3023
E-mail: support@bhg.com
Their Facebook Fan Page

The contact information for Shine at Yahoo is here.

Shine Suggestion Board (message board)
Yahoo Shine Article Abuse Form (I’d choose other and make sure to include the URL to the article in question)
Yahoo Facebook Fan Page

**Updated**

The article has been updated since I posted this at “oh dark-thirty” in the madrugada. The reference to breastfeeding has been removed completely. That is great but misses my larger point about the article.

During the morning they’ve also put out an apology on the Facebook Fan Page.

We sincerely apologize for the blog post! It was not vetted by our editors, and it reflects poor parenting advice and an offensive tone. We have removed the most patently inappropriate sections. We support breastfeeding moms–and all moms–in their desire to include their children in their public lives. We pledge to do… better in the future in both the tone and content of our posts. We will be posting our positive parenting tips for eating out soon. Post yours on our Discussions tab.

–The editorial team at BHG

Thank you for making the effort to actually own your part in this problem BHG. You are right that the article “reflects poor parenting advice and an offensive tone”. I do not begin to understand why you wouldn’t just pull the whole article if you can see that but I am not in charge of your bottom line and do not contribute to it (I buy none of your magazines). I would encourage you to reconsider leaving even this edited version of the article out there since it still displays an enormous amount of adult privilege and is discriminatory toward children.

**Updated Again**

At some point in the days after the original edit the decision was made to remove the entire article and offer a link to Dining Out with Small Children: 8 Sanity Savers from Real Moms. I would like to express my appreciation for that decision as well as the changes that BHG says they are putting in place to prevent blog posting by BHG authors that are not in alignment with the values of their brand.

And now… Those lovely Commercials embedded for your convenience!

Edited a whole bunch of times in the morning to fix various and sundry spelling errors as well as update on the situation as BHG took action.

A couple of days ago I watched the tail-end of a Twitter dust-up between a young man and some lactivists that I follow regarding breastfeeding in public (hereafter known as NIP). The tweets got so tense I responded viscerally just from watching the exchange (you know those tight-in-the-chest, tingly arm, itchy finger, head-in-a-vice-ready-to-explode, Oh-no-you-didn’t-just-say!! feelings).  The logical fallacies – OH! the logical fallacies just about took my breath away! The ignorant disdain of NIP, conflation of the function of breast and penis, as well as child abuse and feeding your child were really hard to watch.

I had two or three tweets typed out (I kept backspacing) that I was able to prevent myself from adding to the situation and stirring the pot.

What held me back? Part of it was my desire not to have nuker-style posts associated with my Twitter account. Part of it was my assumption that nothing I had to say, even if I could have found a reasonable tone, would have made a difference to this particular guy. Mostly though it was my monitoring of what I was thinking as I was reading the antagonists tweets and the assumptions exposed in the snarky rejoinders rocketing around in my head. This guy wasn’t really saying anything new. It was the same old tropes about NIP regurgitated by a young-than-me male. My responses to him were all about his age and gender (and some blatant privilege) rather than the verbal crap spilling from his lips.

So I sat on my fingers until they hurt and directed the few tweets I did make to the lactivists rather than engaging directly in the dust-up.

What do you do when you see breastfeeding issues being thrashed out on twitter or in message board communities? Do you sit on your fingers? Cheer on the gladiators? Join in the fracas?

A lot has been said about Facebook’s hypocrisy regarding the way they treat breastfeeding images and other images of partially or fully exposed breasts. You’d have to be living under a rock to not know about this if you are a part of the online breastfeeding community. That topic has been really well covered by many smart people already. I’m not going there today.

Here’s where I’m going.

Sometimes the strangest things intersect with breastfeeding. That was my first thought when I read a Jezebel piece on a Facebook group that was left up for months before being being taken down a few weeks ago. What was the topic of the group you ask?

Rape.

No – really. Rape.

So my first reaction was to be surprised about the intersectionality of breastfeeding and rape. On the surface they seemed worlds apart to me. Then I read  hortense’s take on the whole mess situation over at Jezebel and thought about it a bit more.

Interesting, isn’t it, that in the eyes of Facebook, a woman shouldn’t be allowed to show her breasts while feeding her child, but it’s perfectly acceptable for men to make a highly public “sport” out of rape.

OH! I thought. I get it. Level UP to drill back down.

This is the culture we live in folks. It’s the culture we work in every day trying to normalize breastfeeding and support breastfeeding mothers. It’s a culture where women are hood ornaments, and breasts are put to work selling beer, vodka, and other alcoholic beverages, as well as magazines,  rock-and-roll (or more magazines as the case may be), computers and of all things – pudding. We’ve even managed to sexualize  breast cancer. Are we good at this or what?

Ours is a culture where breasts are so sexualized that a woman can actually buy into it herself and then give away autonomy over her own body to her baby or partner. We meet our hypothetical nursing mother when she finds herself struggling with breastfeeding because -

• Her partner is jealous of a baby using “his”* breasts and is making breastfeeding stressful. She’s looking for support as she weathers this or ideas for how to deal with the attitude that another adult feels they have a right to her body. The idea that her breasts belong to her since they are part of her anatomy and that her partner doesn’t have a right to any part of her body is often not part of the equation for her or her partner. Maybe she and her partner can’t see that breasts can be multi-functional. Feeding baby – Erogenous zone. They don’t see that it’s a situation where you could think in terms of AND not OR.
• She’s dealing with any number of issues related to breastfeeding in public. She’s struggling to become comfortable with it herself. Possibly she’s been shamed by a stranger while exercising her legally protected right to feed her baby in any venue where she and the baby would otherwise have a right to be.
• She’s struggling with that slippery slope known as “discreet” and how it’s impacting her.
• A corporation like Facebook is telling her that images of her breastfeeding her baby are offensive and are being removed to protect teen members. Her account is being threatened with suspension or deletion and she embarrassed, infuriated, disappointed.

This culture of ours is also a culture where rape of women is acceptable. Don’t believe me that rape is acceptable? I want you to think about that -

• the next time you hear a rape joke and have to decide whether to laugh (at rape – because rape is funny)
• the next time it’s explained to your that the rape wasn’t really rape.
• the next time you discuss how to end rape and the idea that rape will end when men stop raping gets you uncomprehending looks.

Intersectionality at last. Drilling back down.

A. Women are not valued equally with men.

B. Breastfeeding is not viewed as normal in our society which sexualizes the body parts used to nourish our children. Male Gaze anyone?

C. Breastfeeding is not protected by (mostly male) lawmakers because (see A).

D. Rape culture exists because (see A)

At the same time Facebook, a private company, was (and is) removing certain breastfeeding images because they consider them to be obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit they left a pro-rape group up (regardless of their stated policies) for months. Two faces of the same culture. Both faces expose the devaluation of women and their experiences.

Facebook is a private company making their own site rules. I respect their right to do that  and at the same time I support efforts to affect change in those rules. I think the rules relating to breastfeeding are wrong. I realize that they are a reflection of a culture that doesn’t value women. They are a reflection of a world where women and their concerns are not important. Breastfeeding images are viewed as offensive or sexual because we live in a society which sees women’s bodies through a prism of male needs and desires.

In a world where women were valued equally breastfeeding photos on a privately owned social networking site would not be a problem because they would be viewed as normal and appropriate. Breastfeeding would be protected and well supported. Groups supporting and encouraging rape would be filtered off the site immediately and those members involved would find their accounts permanently disabled. It would be a complete 180. We’d be through the looking glass.

I fear we have a LONG way to go.

* I have yet to meet a lesbian couple articulating this issue. That does not mean it isn’t happening – just that I haven’t encountered it.

Facebook’s Breastfeeding Ban [LA Times]
Facebook breastfeeding pic takedown gets backs up [The Register]
Breaking it down for facebook [PhD in Parenting]
Censoring Breastfeeding on Facebook [New York Times - Motherlode Blog]

Elite college students proud of ‘pro-rape’ Facebook page [The Sydney Morning Herald]
“Anti-Consent” College Students Create a “Pro-Rape” Facebook Group [Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux at Care 2 Make a Difference www.care2.com)

Images

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