Of course we need such anti-women women.

Do you expect men to shoulder the whole burden? Typical. ;o)

LOL Al Jahom – yep, we ought to spread the burden.

I cannot see you complaining about young women feeding their babies though, sir. I would imagine you actively demand it.

These things have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

This one is fine: Exhibit A </a.

This one not so much: Exhibit B

And if breast feeding is okay, these are both SFW )

AJ

crapping html parsing humbuggery. I fail

Point taken, Miss Belgrave – now please put ur (self-admittedly) saggy tits away, thanks.

Al Jahom,
So let me get this right – women are allowed to breastfeed or not, depending on whether they meet your standards of ogleability? Maybe you’d rather the rest of us didn’t show our bodies in public? That’s not your call.

I’m wondering if this is a bit of a strawman story.
On thursday evening I was with having dinner with a Canadian woman I had met in my guesthouse in Belfast, and she was getting them out to feed her daughter every fifteen minutes or so while we ate in a busy city center gastro pub.
No one batted an eyelid. Except for me once or twice. I didn’t know her very well.

I’ve got kids who were breast fed but funnily enough my partner always managed to do it without getting her tits out in public – a bit of planning means your kids shouldn’t be ravenously hungry at an inconvenient moments, and failing that you can do something involving a pump and a bottle for real emeergencies.
A lot of women who do this I think are just looking for a reaction/trying to make some ludicrous point. It’s nothing to do with womens rights – some people find it embarrasing so in order to avoid offence it should be avoided or at least done discreetly.

@ 6 “Maybe you’d rather the rest of us didn’t show our bodies in public? That’s not your call.”

It’s not yours either – it’s the law. A bloke caught short walking home from the pub who relieves himself against a lampost can be prosecuted and end up on the sex offenders register, why do different standards apply just because the offender happens to be female ?

@Damon – yeah, could be a strawperson argument: always a risk when you spend yr life faffing about on twitter & picking up stories from it. On the other hand, I’ve been in situations where people have clearly been upset when seeing people breastfeed, and I have heard people complain loudly. Most of the time, people are totally fine about it. Sometimes, they’re not.

I would also point out that this subject gave me an opportunity to upload a picture of a nice pair of norks to the internet. Not that the internet needed another pair, exactly, but I did find it liberating.

@Matt – sometimes babies get hungry off schedule though, no? You can’t plan for everything, so it’s a bit rough to say all women who feed in public are exhibitionists. If you’ve been shopping and there have been queues, delays, etc, your plans may not always go to plan, as it were. I’ve seen women breastfeed their babies on the bus, etc – see it a lot on the trusty 53 from Whitehall to Woolwich, which is invariably delayed and stuck in traffic and behind schedule. I’d much rather a woman fed her baby than let it scream when we’re all stuck on a foul bus and about to go mad anyway.

Why do people end up on the sex offenders’ register for piddling on lamp posts? Piddling isn’t shagging…?

I do love the idea of the uptight matt telling his Mrs not to get them out.
I hope you kept abreast of the problem.

Damon
Your guesthose sounds fnatsatic
Irish stag dos and Canadain breas feeders.
You should get a sitcom

sorry
guesthouse and fantastic.
Sorry too many beers and I had a piddle in the street.
God I hope I don’t go on the list

The funny thing is that most people who are so anti-human that they hate mums breast-feeding in public are the first to shout “censorship!” if you suggest that the Sun or the Sport shouldn’t be situated next to the Beano in the newsagents.

[3] Can we please have a policy of not linking to pictures of women with tattoos?

It is disgusting and unnatural and it frightens my cats. Well, it would if I had any.

Wow, there really are some right prats in Sainsbury’s with nothing better to do.

Having said that, one could take it too far: http://www.theonion.com/video/advocacy-group-mothers-have-right-to-expose-milken,17381/

Have any similiar reports come in about other supermarket stores or only about Sainsbury stores? If not, the conclusions are pretty obvious.

Btw for very different reasons, I stopped shopping at Sainsbury stores several years back. My current favourite chain is Morrisons. Perhaps because this is only the fourth largest UK chain of supermarkets in terms of turnover, they seem to try harder to please customers. Any way, I’m impressed with both the service quality and the prices.

There are some woman who hate their own sex. Sad but true.

There is a lot of them that work for the Daily Mail. In fact, it is part of the spec you need if you want to work there.

A lot of women who do this I think are just looking for a reaction/trying to make some ludicrous point.

A lot of people certainly do make ludicrous points, but it ain’t those women, it’s more people like you.

Sunny. I know why you and Earwicga over on Pickled Politics hate spiked online.
It’s because they’ve been there first on all these issues. Going back ten years or more.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/issues/C112/

Nick @16 interesting video, and funny too.
The breastpumping woman from ”feed where we please” was very attractive woman.
So come on Sally, tell us what’s the etiquette.
Look/don’t look? Smile benignly? Try to suppress thoughts on seeing this womans nipple?

Breasts cause earthquakes – will people never learn?!?

Just completely absurd and backward. That is what breasts are for! THAT IS THEIR FUNCTION.

Unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable.

Matt – I have to say I have once been in a situation where I felt someone was breastfeeding her child – aged 2 – in public with some wish to make a reaction/point. But this was just a single occasion.

It takes a long time to feed a baby and it’s very tiring – and women should certainly be able to feed their babies while out in town etc.

The problem is that women can’t win – here’s a link to an article and comments about women being picked on for *not* breastfeeding – for bottlefeeding young babies in public.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/susanhill/5784308/even-more-bullying.thtml

oh how I love my tits as a woman!

That sounds like a crap Sunday so let me cheer everyone up with my song ‘Gordon Brown be my Angel’ which is full of the… female reproductive system. It even has the words ‘baby’ and ‘reproductive system’ within it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCEWhEuhRoo (lyrics annotated)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znUtocdwnYw (BETTER SOUND QUALITY)

Brahms Lullaby

Gordon Brown! Gordon Brown!
Will you be my angel?
Guardian angel is what I meant
Will you rescue my soul?

For you are in charge
Of these people I wrote to
Stephen Timms, Jack Straw
Let me place my trust in you

Gordon Brown! MP’s!
Let me sing out loud
For what you do, for my country
For my reproductive system

You right wrongs! My right’s been wronged
I am desperate for you
Not just you! There’s Jon Herring
I’m a violated woman

Gordon Brown, help me sleep!
Help me sleep like a baby
Will my babies ever come out?
Maternal desires!
I lost my womanhood
In a sinister curse
Gordon Brown! Bring it back!
You are perfect for that!

There’s a reason why exposing yourself in public is a crime – it offends people.

Why did this lady choose to sit down in a cafe to breastfeed? Could she not have gone somewhere more private like the toilets or her car?

I agree with the old bats.

@Richard – Most women find it is possible to breastfeed very discreetly. Breastfeeding in a toilet would be pretty unpleasant – would you suggest the woman sit on the toilet while feeding? There isn’t always a chair in a loo. It takes a long time to feed a small baby. Some people don’t have a car – me for example.I assume some people (not most but there must be some) are offended if women expose their hair or legs. Maybe we should all cover up completely so as not to offend anyone! Do you also object to girly magazines being on display?

[26] Quite. It is certainly possible to breastfeed in public without exposing oneself – I’ve seen it done.

Isn’t one definition of a conservative someone who believes that where offence is taken it must also have been given?

What idiots.

And the difference Matt is that piss leaves disgusting traces and is also corrosive.

I don’t believe the same is true of breast milk!

@kate
>Why do people end up on the sex offenders’ register for piddling on lamp posts? Piddling isn’t shagging…?

Because we have an unutterably stupid set of laws around “sex” offences.

.. Last month. put on sex offenders register for 5 years for urinating at a barbecue when drunk (4 litres of cider). One report refers to him “teasing a dog” with his willy.

Report
http://menmedia.co.uk/news/s/1202183_man_found_guilty_of_indecent_exposure
Sentencing:
http://menmedia.co.uk/news/s/1222605_indecent_exposure_man_put_on_sex_offenders_register

(Justice would be if the dog nipped it).

… put on sex offenders register for 5 years for pleasuring himself in private when hotel cleaner happened to walk in

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1569272/Man-who-had-sex-with-bicycle-sentenced.html

… Met saying that 16 year old will be put on sex offenders register for consensual sex with 15 year old girl/boyfriend (interesting that they assume the boy is 16)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6717997.stm

Any of these will end your career in the caring professions due to the Vetting and Barring disclosure regime, which is not time-barred (unless I have missed something); there are cases where a 15 year old has lied about their age at a party to deflect parents, who go to police, then the 16 year old taken a caution to end police involvement. The lie is admitted, but nothing can be done after the fact on an admission. That is the end of any prospect of a career in education for that person, as it is an admission of guilt on the record until they are 100.

These days you lose your 20 year teaching or caring professions career pretty much at random when you haven’t actually *done* anything; just an allegation that the police dismiss as not worthy of investigation is enough due to disclosure and the prevailing culture (note: this comment is *not* about rape anonymity).

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/17/gossip_work_check/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2213420/John-Pinnington-Police-should-be-able-to-let-false-allegations-lapse.html

Each of these cases is a personal tragedy, and I’m amazed that any men at all go into any of the caring professions. I think that any who do so are probably fools.

It’s a godawful mess. Thank New Labour and their mad authoritarian streak, combined with knee-jerk reactions to “sex-crime” (culprits 1 and 2 of many: Newspaper editors and Margaret Moran), though I suspect in this area the Tories will not be much better.

This is a Civil Liberties campaign for the next few years.

@9 – I got fined £70 nicker for having a wazz on the outside shrubs of a graveyard on the way home from the boozer because I didn’t want to widdle on gravestones. True, it probably didn’t help that my buddy pushed me into the shrubs just as the police came round the corner so all they could see was a pair of flailing legs and a couple of chaps laughing their err..tits off.

Reading around, the report revealing the “success” of the Sarah’s Law Pilot also showed that in half of the 3cases passed to the review team, where the police had done a full check on the “subject”, had “no unsupervised access to the child” and should therefore have been excluded from the process at the first stage.

El Reg put it better than I can:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/26/csord_review/

“When it came to looking at how the scheme had worked, the researchers were able to review just 159 applications – or just over half of those investigated by the police. This reduction in numbers appears to be because the police determined which cases to forward to the review body for evaluation, which raises questions about the soundness of the sampling procedure and possible bias introduced into the research by police forces.

…

Hawktalk draws attention to a number of flaws in the scheme that appear not even to have crossed the researchers’ radar. Table 7 of the Home Office report shows that 54 per cent of the individuals investigated did not have access to the children named in the application. In other words, over half of the applications should have fallen at the first hurdle.”

Roll on the future where random people will just be declared guilty …

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your links – wanted to acknowledge them and say I’m going to have a good read through tonight after work. There’s a whole new topic there…! All the best, Kate.

Kate

Thanks – yes, a huge subject. I’ve covered this in the past with about ten articles, as have others such as Cosmodaddy.

There’s also been debate in legal and police circles about changes to cautions, problems of a target culture, and the scope of safeguarding etc.

My most recent piece was here:
http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2010/05/27/operation-ore-profound-consequences-if-it-collapses/

Rgds

Nothing wrong with breast-feeding – or, indeed, breasts in public in general. Men walk around topless all the time, which I personally find a much more scarring sight. Especially when they have breasts.

I believe in Scotland, women’s rights to breast-feed in public are protected by law. One can only hope such sanity prevails south of the border, some day.

I’m a Brit currently living in Thailand and if you want ‘anti-women’ you should see most of the western guys here. Losers of the first order and they HATE western women with a passion. Likely because none of us will go out with them

And that whole thing about breastfeeding being ‘disgusting’ what the hell do those stupid women think women did to feed their kids for a few hundred thousand years?