Six Apart, creators of Movable Type and, more recently, owners of LiveJournal, have decided to harrass LiveJournal users whose default icons depict breastfeeding.
There are few issues on which I am dead-set, hardline, and utterly unwilling to grant any compromise whatsoever. Breastfeeding is one. It's natural, there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing it anywhere at all, this would literally be a healthier society if we could set aside our pseudo-Victorian claptrap about keeping the breasts covered at all times, and anyone who floats the "Hey, breastfeed all you want, just go to the bathroom to do it and don't just whip a boob out in public because it makes me go all squicky inside" crap can kiss my ass. They can kiss my ass twice if the same people who say that get all excited at action movies where people are constantly getting shot and blown up. I'm continually amazed at the way this country fetishizes violence but insists that anything connected with the natural functioning of the human body be kept carefully secret behind a veil of "morality".
I signed up for LiveJournal a while back, because I intended to set up a LiveJournal feed of this blog. I never did anything with it, and mainly it only serves to allow me to leave comments on LJ's that don't accept comments from "outsiders"; the only post at my LJ basically directs people over here where the good stuff is. So I can't really join the protest blackout. But I'm here in spirit, folks. As PNH writes over at Making Light:
And it’s not amusing at all when any corporation decides to endorse the view that breastfeeding is something scandalous that must happen only in private.
Amen to that. The Wife breastfed The Daughter, and I am absolutely convinced that this is why her first two years were so healthy. Aside from a couple of minor bouts of the sniffles, The Daughter didn't get really and truly sick for the first time until six months after she'd been weaned, six months after she turned two. (Little Quinn, of course, was a different story -- he never took any food by mouth, but he got breastmilk through his G-tube for as long as The Wife could produce enough by exclusively pumping.) We were never confronted in public by the anti-boob crowd when feeding time came round, but if we had, I can absolutely guarantee that my response would have been some variant of "If it bothers you, then f***ing look at something else." And that will most certainly be my response if the subject ever arises again. (No, that's not indicating anything, before anyone asks. I'm just saying, you never know.)
(And you know what? Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd be willing to bet that this new policy at LJ is in response to a very small number of complaints. I am getting more and more tired every day of this idea that's somehow taken root in our society that any complaint must be taken seriously. Why can't we just admit that some people just aren't reasonable, and that their complaints do not warrant being taken seriously?)
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