Latching onto Oppression

We're sitting at one of our fave breakfast spots (while most may go out for dinner, we go out for brekkie because I'm usually pooped by 10:00) and a woman walks in with her baby all firmly tucked into her Cadillac of strollers (my nickname for those horrid plastic contraptions with cup holders everyone wheels around) and proceeds to ask the girl at the counter if it might be okay if she breastfeeds her baby.

I have not seen a lot of women breastfeeding in public. And when I have, I've never seen one just whip her top off and latch that baby on while everything hangs out. There is always a certain level of discreetness. Probably much more discreet than I am at Old Navy when I don't want to fight my way across the store just to try on a t-shirt so I pull it on under my shirt which never goes exactly the way I expect and I always end up showing a bit more skin than I had wanted to. And certainly more discreet than the man-boobies (thank you DtD for the term) that I see shoved in my face whenver the temp goes above 65 degrees in Seattle.

So this woman was not asking if the restaurant would be okay if she exposed her self. She was asking for permission to feed her child. It wasn't the booby that might cause the problem, it was the act of breastfeeding.

M. and I have been talking about oppression lately (one of the many reasons I love her, after thirteen years we can still have a rousing coversation about oppression). She has been talking a lot about the subversive oppression that women face in society and how she feels (and I agree) that her internalized sexism is much worse and more influential than any oppression she faces as a lesbian.

The woman in the restaurant, who was not young (prob about forty), was furthering that oppression by timidly asking if it might okay for her to feed her child. She is a white, middle class woman who lives in an urban environment and has countless resources available to her about the benefits of breastfeeding. Yet she has shame about something that is done openly and naturally by women in third world countries all around the world. She has shame because our society has told her that her body is something offensive to other people and that the act of merely feeding your infant is frowned upon.

This isn't just oppressing women for doing something absolutely natural. Ultimately it hurts the children. If a woman can breastfeed, she should, and she should do it wherever and whenever she needs to.