NS February 15th, 2009

This article (the final in a series of three), by one of my favourite lactivist bloggers, is absolutely brilliant at explaining why the use of the word ‘discreet’ in discussions of breastfeeding in public is such a dangerous and loaded term, what the social and feminist implications are and why it needs to be completely discarded from our vocabulary. This is a large excerpt.

When we use discreet, we evoke several extremely unpleasant and potentially damaging reactions: damaging to women and children.

In the immediate the very act of describing something that requires discretion, we create a world where the act in question can be seen as indiscreet. We cannot use one, without evoking the other:

discreet – indiscreet
modest – immodest
respectful – disrespectful
considerate – inconsiderate

As soon as we use one of the above words to describe any action or behaviour of a breastfeeding mother – we evoke the spectre of the street woman phantom. She’s out and about, haunting our social interactions. As I’ve just dealt with this in detail at the end of the previous section, this requires no more discussion here. Suffice to say the use of the word discreet in this fashion, is a word of patriarchal control.

It is also a word of blame. It requires a mother to take responsibility for her actions in feeding her child, and to either be discreet, or indiscreet. Everything that then happens to her, can then be heaped upon her head as her own fault. She created the situation, and she is responsible for the results.

That this echoes, a similar element in the history of female liberation into public spaces, unaccompanied and in charge of her own behaviour, seems to have slipped by a lot of people in the night. When I was a young teenager, I knew that dangers existed for women, if they dressed ‘wrong’ and acted ‘wrong’ in public. I also knew that the responsibility to keep myself safe from sexual attack and rape, was mine and mine alone. I read, and saw on the screen, instances of women who were reporting assaults, and the first question from the police was “What were you wearing?”

From there on it, it would be an attack on the women reporting the assault, based on what she had done, to create the situation. The reality of this situation – where the demeanour, behaviour, clothing and attitude of the women who had been attacked, became the meat of the investigation and any subsequent court case – was so pervasive, that it took years for the laws and procedures to be changed. Years of heavy campaigning by woman’s groups and law societies, for the moral character of the women who had been attacked, to be removed from the arena. It is now socially unacceptable for us to view those who have been sexually attacked or abused, to be blamed for the events in this manner.

But we allow it over public breastfeeding, and seem blind to the resonances.

Peruse any of the myriad comments columns and hateblogs that erupt over any media reporting of breastfeeding discrimination, and you find an entire tranche of ‘logical’ questions to ask, before making your mind up whether this was a good breastfeeder, or a bad one. What was the mother wearing? Did she have the right clothes on? A blanket? Where was she? In the corner, face to the wall? How old was the baby? How did she react to being told she was offending? The answers determine if she has public sympathy or not: if an offence took place. If she is worthy of being considered unfortunate in having been humiliated and chastised?

Now, this being teh internetz, let me make one thing very clear. I am not equating being raped, or sexually assaulted, with being thrown out of an eatery for breastfeeding. I am equating the attitude that a woman is responsible for the actions of others if she flaunts her body… with the attitude that the woman is responsible for the actions of others if she flaunts her body. This connection alone, I feel, is enough to ask us to remove these words from our thought, when we discuss breastfeeding in public. In this context, this is an immeasurably damaging word.

It is also a blunt instrument of a word. As myself, and Rabbi Artson pointed out – it has no intrinsic meaning, or fixed definition. It’s a movable feast, that means many things, to many people. Hence it is just a huge massive blunt instrument, a great big stick, we hand to other people to beat us with. Hence the plethora of questions… what did she do, what was she wearing, how old was her child? One person’s discreet is another person’s disgust. No matter what you do, someone will be offended, and scream you are being indiscreet. You then open yourself to both defending yourself against the word, and proving you are not. And in every protest you utter, you hit yourself harder and harder with the Great Big Stick of the meaningless word.

It is a word of apology. It completely accepts that something is happening that should be hidden, and that the opinion of the onlooker is of relevance. Worse, it sets up The Apology Dance. Read the reports of mothers being harassed and babies being told to stop feeding, and you find the mother, mindful of her need to prove she wasn’t doing the wrong nasty common breastfeeding stuff, starts with her Apology Dance: I had a blanket, I was sitting at the back, I was facing the wall, My baby was only XXX old, You couldn’t see anything… I was wearing a demure outfit top to toe and was walking to the library when he attacked my lord.. and my hair was scraped back and I wasn’t wearing any make up and I had my clean white big cotton knickers on….

There is nothing to apologise for. But watch how lambasted a mother is, the second she refuses to apologise. Observe just how much more vitriol is poured upon her, it she has the temerity to say “I was doing nothing wrong.” “I have a right to sit on this part of the aeroplane too.” “My baby has a right to eat in this restaurant.” “I will not to sit in the back.” And if she mentions she has a legal right to breastfeed. Call the police on this harridan! Denny’s [link added for explanation] must have sorely hated not being able to drive the restaurant straight to the police station…

It is a word of deflection. This one is absolutely crucial. It deflects everything away from the other injured part in all this sadness. It removes focus from the child, to the mother. It moves responsibility for the harassment of that child, from the onlooker doing the objecting, to the mother. In a debate about whether or not the mother was being discreet, or indiscreet, the true protagonist of the action that is taking place – the child – is rendered utterly invisible.

Which is the point, is it not?

Babies cannot read. They don’t understand what discreet means. They only understand hunger, distress, discomfort. Mothers don’t instigate breastfeeding – the child does. The younger the child, the more immediate the need for instant access to the source of all nurture: the mother’s breast. Babies as young as three days old, completely covered by a blanket or the mother’s jacket, have been harassed for daring to fall hungry in public. The mother responding to the that primal need, castigated for being indiscreet, immodest, disrespectful of others and inconsiderate of their location. In the particular case linked to, the mother was so upset, she weaned the baby completely. The dangers here are obvious: the use of the word discreet, leads to premature weaning.

Premature weaning is a significant health risk to babies. It also raises the risks of ill health in the mother. Mothers who can cope with breastfeeding in public when the baby is small, and without the muscle development to have independent control, often wean completely as the baby gains in dexterity. They can no longer guarantee complete coverage of their breast, by the baby’s head. This is is compounded by the additional prejudice about the appropriate age for a child to be breastfeeding in the first place. Despite many years of clear and direct health advice from the World Health Organisation, that breastfeeding should be the exclusive source of a child’s food for the first six months of their life, and the main source of food for a minimum of two years… every one and their mother knows when breastfeeding should really stop. When it moves from the child’s needs – nutritional and emotional – to the mother’s: almost always presented as a her twisted, perverted sexual motive.

So I don’t think it is an overstatement, or hyperbole, to discuss the use of the word discreet, as having dangers attached to it. The use of the word discreet, in common currency and parlance, in the context of discussing breastfeeding, reduces breastfeeding. It impacts on how many women breastfeed their children, and for how long. It also opens mothers up to unspeakable and base attacks, purely for being female, and using their body to nurture their young.

Now, having said all that, we are left with some challenges. If we do remove such words from our vocabulary, consigning them to the waste bin of history, how do we replace them? How do we discuss, and support, breastfeeding in public? There are issues to be discussed, and conversations that need to be had: how do we do that?

Well, I, for one, am all for actually naming the processes that are actually in play, when these issues arise. My experience is that most new mothers are not fretting and worrying about being discreet because they actually feel that what they are doing is inappropriate: they are terrified of being attacked for breastfeeding their precious baby. Certainly, that was how I felt, alone in public for the first time, worrying about how to juggle a squirming baby, a blouse and a bra clip. Getting a baby to the breast quickly, smoothly and neatly, is a learned skill. It takes quite a lot of eye-to-hand co-ordination and quite a lot of confidence. You feel exposed – but that has little to do with your breast. You feel emotionally exposed: helpless to defend your precious child, if a bigot walks by. That’s why protection for feeding your baby in public, such as exists in Scotland, is so vital.

My position on this is simple: if a mother feels she need camouflage, to help deflect attack, then mother gets camouflage. Even a hideous hooter-hider, if that’s what she wants. It’s her body, and her child. If she needs camouflage, and support in developing camouflage techniques – then she should get it. And not feel in the slightest that she is doing anything inappropriate.

What’s appropriate, is that she feels safe, and protected, in a hostile world. But let’s not pretend that it is anything less than this. Let’s name the fears, and the actions required to protect a woman out in public, for being attacked, criticised and physically harassed for having her female body, and her child, out from the back bedroom. Let’s stop talking about her need to be discreet, to avoid appropriate censure, and start accepting that its the attackers that have a problem.

A curious things happens to most new mothers, btw. They move through the feeling emotionally exposed stage: confidence starts to build. No one attacks them, the bra clip flip becomes second nature, the towel falls to the floor, and is never picked up. We become confident and utterly unconscious of our bodies’ threat to the public space. We simply forget we are carriers of the strange disease of being female: we become mothers nurturing our beloved children. We forget we need to hide!

We become liberated breastfeeders. Our mental landscape, of what we are doing, leaves the back bedroom.

We are OUT of the back bedroom. We have been liberated from the cloister. Unfortunately, our sexual bodies were released before our mothering ones were. Many of us swallowed the pseudo-feminist clap trap that liberating a women from the back bedroom, was also liberating her from her children. That formula and bottles, and other people to feed your baby was a liberating experience for the ‘modern women’. The woman could walk outside, but the children stayed behind.

Oh yes. It liberated us all right: into the work force. Regardless of our needs and desires: we were told we were only ‘real women’ if we threw off the shackles of child rearing, and embraced the shackles of… looking sexy at all times and working twice as hard for less money than the men?

Oh yes, that was so liberating.

Women are out of the back bedroom… BUT SO ARE OUR CHILDREN. We have brought them out into the light and fresh air with us. We demand you accomodate us as a unit: a biological unit comprising two seperate individuals: a dyad. You want us out in public, to spin your sexual fantasies upon, and to work in your ecomony? To mother our children and raise the doctors, lawyers, dentists, taxi drivers, police officers, refuse collectors, cooks and bottle washers who will care for you in your old age? You want us to raise children whilst being a full part of this world? Then accept our children are outside with us. Make room for them. Acocomodate their need for us, and our need for them, in social and economic discourse. They are on our breast, in public spaces: deal with it.

I couldn’t agree more, Morgan.

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