Powerful hyperbole
Chief Tango sends us a link to the Huffington Post entitled “7 Powerful Photos Of Military Moms Breastfeeding In Uniform“.
I’m wondering a bunch of things. First of all, what makes them “powerful”? It’s something that millions of women do each day, so what’s the big-damn-deal? Some of the kids in the pictures appear to be too old to be breast feeding – that’s kind of creepy.
I have to wonder how many times a day a woman has to breast feed her baby while in uniform in public? It doesn’t seem to me it’s that often. Are they taking their kids to work? To the field? On deployments? That would be powerful.
Some of the pictures were taken at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. What’s that about?
“I have learned that many active duty moms are struggling to find support to continue nursing and pumping once they return to work full-time,” [photographer Vanessa] Simmons told The Huffington Post.
Simmons is the founder of “Normalize Breastfeeding” which is another of those organizations which think they have an issue. I don’t know how you cannot “normalize” something that our “Creator” endowed half of us with the ability to accomplish. Seems a lot more normal than some of the other behavior that is being being “normalized” these days.
With this series, Simmons wants viewers to see the beauty and power in military moms breastfeeding.
“I hope that others recognize the difficulty at hand for every mother to breastfeed their baby, yet I also hope that they see the strength of the women who serve our country while serving their families simultaneously,” she said.
“I am inspired by their stories, I am impressed by their bravery in the midst of mothering, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to share the images that I have captured,” she added.
It seems to me that Simmons is trying to politicize the issue instead of normalizing it. I guess “powerful”, “bravery” and “beauty” are just words we use these days like “is” and “are”.
Category: Politics
Oh, let me.
Dontcha just love public exhibitionism?
Nursing/breastfeeding is supposed to be a moment become mom and baby. The in-your-face thing does not impress me. It just reeks of look-at-me!!! Perhaps some day, these women will grow up. If that happens, please let me know.
EX-P, My friend, as much as I love and absolutely respect you, I must also share my opinion. I breast fed my first child in public, BUT, discreetly unhooked the special breastfeeding bra on the front, covered my baby and everything, before adjusting the baby to my breast. Not once did anyone know that I was doing, however, once I did go into the ladies room of a expensive department store and did the same thing. A women existing the head took one look at the blanket coverings the front of my body and started a cussing what a disgusting pig I was. I removed the baby from my breast, removed the blanket and all that showed was my T-shirt in down to the zipper if my Levi’s. I gave the baby to my mother and exploded in several languages what the fuck crawled up her ass? Did you see my breast or anything else? No, but breast feeding is a private thing. I pulled up my T-shirt, unsnapped the bra straps that held my breasts, pulled both out and said “SUCK AWAY YOU STUPID BITCH AND MUCH MORE”. My mother showed me after I gave birth how to breastfeed without drawing attention. I had to testify in court on a drug bust I did before going on maturity leave. As I walked to the stand I did what I normally do. I was sworn in and the Defense attorney objected to the baby being fed while I testify. Prosecutor objected and asked WTF was the problem. He could hear the baby making little noises and it would distract his questioning. The Judge asked me are you feeding the baby and how old. Yes, three months. Was she breastfeeding before you were sworn in? Yes, I prepared as I appoarched the witness stand. He then asked if anyone in the courtroom know what I was doing on my way to the stand and when I was sworn in? Nobody answered yes. Over ruled to Defense, Sustained to the Prosecution. He turned to me and said “its lovely to know that… Read more »
Oh! This is for everyone and its really disgusting. 100% hippie commune scum, actually eat the placenta after washing and cooking.
Life was soooo much simpler when the majority of society subscribed to the common expectation that if it involved bodily fluids it was a private thing.
No, it’s not just someone else feeding the baby that I don’t want to share in public – I also don’t want folks spitting on me, brushing their teeth on the park bench next to me, and a whole host of other activities involving snot, urine, blood, or even ear wax.
There is something horridly dysfunctional about people who insist that others participate, even passively, in whatever they arbitrarily declare appropriate public behavior.
So you’re saying that mother’s milk is in the same category as spit, urine, feces, and other nasty fluids?
How interesting…
I agree that it’s a fairly private action, but on the other hand I know that historically speaking public breastfeeding was considered normal for a long time. I suspect neo-Puritanism was one of the culprits.
WTFO? In uniform? And out in public? This is WAY out of line.
Do we have a SJA/JAG on Team TAH that can give an assessment of this from the UCMJ perspective?
And come to think of it, what does PAO think about this?
I’ll betcha that none of those females had command permission to participate in this photo shoot while in uniform. Hopefully someone in a position of authority is looking into this and is asking some very serious questions.
By military standards, breastfeeding is about as brave and powerful as taking a piss in the woods.
How many of those women did you hit??
…..weeeelllllll
How many kids are there? 🙂
I thought the military existed to kill people and break things. That no longer seems to be the #1 mission.
I’m a dinosaur. Claw will set me straight at the TAH cadre call in a few weeks.
I’m an old dinosaur also as I have absolutely zero experience with what females do with their babies while on a active duty day and wearing the uniform. I was never in an outfit that was authorized female personnel.
Call me crass, or out of touch with the modern world, but to my eyes every one of those children look to be too old to yet be breastfeeding.
If they’re old enough to be walking and talking, breastfeeding time is past. JHMO.
You know, having sex is also a natural thing, reproduction being necessary for the survival of our species. However, you don’t see me and Mrs. NBC getting funky at the Jefferson Memorial.
Thank you Mr. Obama for slowly erasing all of our “cultural norms”.
Maybe I will be able to soon mark the Jefferson Memorial off of mine and Mrs. NBC’s bucket list after all…
“You know, having sex is also a natural thing….” Tell that to Fred and George.
Damn… bet the DC Fire Department will need to hose the place down after you and the missus “do the nasty” there.
Might need the whole damn haz-mat team… 😉
You know, nbcguy54, if you said ‘good manners and decency’, it would be more accurate.
In many cultures, women carry the babies in a sling in front, so that the infants can nurse while the moms are working.
I don’t have an issues with that. Mine is with this need to make a ‘statement’ (whatever that is) and let all of the rest of us know that, in a restaurant on a Friday night, they can’t bring a bottle for the baby but have to show all of us what they’re doing.
It’s just plain bad manners in this country, but since they’ve never learned any manners at all, they don’t get that.
I don’t have issues with this in general either, and I would guess that the vast majority of people don’t either.
What is happening is that by throwing this basic “non-issue” into everyone’s face and trying to make some sort of statement out of it, people are now being forced to take sides. The transgender thing is the same. The Klingers of the world have been surviving just fine until now and suddenly that, public breastfeeding and a slew of other things are now big deals because someone doesn’t subscribe to the “cultural norm”. We’re all evil haters if we’re against public boob feeding and allowing boys to share school locker rooms and showers with our teenage daughters.
Enough!
Just another example of in-your-face custom and tradition tossed out the window and onto the scrap heap. I swear, I can’t help but think that if the Greatest Generation had known what was in store, they would have said, “Screw it. Why risk life and limb today if our progeny will just be giving it all away tomorrow.”
To my mind, it’s my generation, the Baby Boomers, who fucked everything up. All the Birkenstock wearin’, granola eatin’ strain of Baby Boomers that is. Whiny fuckers who can’t see past the end of their noses and they passed the bullshit strain to their progeny, you know, the ones who need “safe spaces” to do anything.
Yeah. I have always struggled to understand how so many of the BBs managed to go so wide left when it was their parents and extended family who sacrificed so much during WW II. After WW II, I noticed, what I call dark movies, those that visited issues rarely touched upon before, and those that had gloomy, unhappy themes, and sad endings seemed to grow more numerous. I don’t know. It’s something that I have long wondered about–how the Greatest Generation produced their anthesis in so many ways.
Must agree that it is the boomers who gave the country away, but it was that “greatest generation” who raised us.
My folks blamed a bunch of it on Dr. Spock, then Sesame Street.
i nursed there sons until they were transitioned well to solid food and soppy cups, about 9 months. I never had to make a spectacle of it: there is always a quiet corner somewhere, and i carried a shawl.
This project is all about disabling the military.
sippy cups. Goddamn correction program.
Is their an age cutoff for a child to breastfeed.
perhaps when are old enough for a drivers learning permit.
Powerful pic at the Jeff Mem.
I learned meself two things from it.
1. It is still true that whomever it was that approved the Blueberry uniform for the Navy should be dragged out to the front of a formation and stomped bloody for the stupidity of the decision.
2. It’s rather apparent that there’s no body weight standards enforcement for the female portion of our military.
^^^^ This ^^^^
That’s true but they get waived for 2 PT test and have to be back in standards in a year or will fail the PT test. Now they just changed the fucking standards and made them easer to pass. Yes she is out of them and was probably border line before she dropped that little thing.
I gotta say, the comments on Huff Post for the article are pretty amusing.
Yuval Ginbar;
It would have been heartwarming but these women are still cogs in a killing machine, so making armies women-friendly should not in my view be a feminist priority. Better to reach equality by making armies unpopular for all genders in all nations.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is worse: reading the Huffington Post, or catching a line drive in the nuts with a baseball…
Yeah-getting hit in the nads is the price of playing the sport. It happened to me once (OK it was a softball-a misleadingly named object IMHO). If you love the sport you just have to accept that it will happen occasionally. OTOH I can’t imagine anyone hating themselves enough to willingly read Huffington Post-and I know that lefties really, really hate themselves.
My wife breastfeeds our son (who turned 4 months old today) five times a day. She doesn’t see it as a “brave” thing to do. It’s just something you do, like making breakfast, brushing your teeth, or taking a dump. She also doesn’t care to breastfeed in public, because she doesn’t care to whip out her tits in the open in plain view of everybody.
You really have to wonder about “feminist” movements that get wrapped up in stupid crap like this. This is t even a mountain from a molehill. It’s a mountain from flat ground, from nothing. This is a non-issue.
This chick throws around words like bravery with no comprehension of what they actually mean. A lot of female military personnel have done a lot of brave things. Nursing a baby in front of a camera is not one of them. Saying that it is insults the real bravery of women who have actually performed feats of bravery and heroism.
It may be the use of hyperbole that has become so common, we tend to see ordinary things that we take for granted blown out of proportion to their real state.
For example, the first words of the weather report’s headline yesterday was ‘Bundle up!’, while in the report was the info that the temperature would be 10 degrees chillier than the day before – as if we were facing a drop to subzero cold and a possible blizzard.
Exaggerating the importance of something has become as common as mashed potatoes on the menu, whether it’s a weather report or women doing something normal like nursing their children instead of using formula. This isn’t part of the boomer generation, and neither are these young women. And whoever says these kids should be weaned is right. They all look like they’re at least 2 years old and should be off this routine. This is a stunt to get attention and not much else.
PH2: You often allude to foods in your posts. Yesterday it was chocolate. Today it’s mashed potatoes. You’re slowly winning me over. Jonn’s gonna be ticked.
I didn’t realize that, Chief.
But if you think about it, it’s true. When has a menu at a restaurant not been written to stir your appetite? And when was the last time you watched a weather forecast that was not done in an almost breathless manner, even if it was only forecasting rain followed by sunshine?
It’s as though exaggerating something is the order of the day, when a simple description might do just as well.
“Hi, my name is Vanessa Simmons.{…] I am a Ghanaian-American woman….” cripes. Ghanaian-American? Pa-leese. Cripes. Since breastfeeding in public is something Mzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Simmons wants to see “normalized”–whatever the hell that means, I’m all for it. I do have two requests, though. First, the woman should be attractive, not some plug-ugly sow. Second, bare both breasts while one is in use. It will keep guys from staring at the breastfeeding side.
Is it just me, or do a couple of those kids look old enough for kindergarten? I’m thinking made up ‘news’ story. Powerfully made up.
” the strength of the women who serve our country while serving their families simultaneously”
Does that mean they were on duty, wearing their duty uniforms, when the photographs were taken?
I still attempt to breastfeed and, sometimes, after I’m done, I open the fridge and grab some milk.
A guy takes a piss behind a building a someone sees him. Cop gives him a ticket.
A woman whips out a boob at a National Monument and is hailed as a hero.
Obviously I’m missing something…
Oh yeah – boobs.
They do make everything better.
True. But not in a Bruce Gender-Bender way. I prefer mine attached to a real female woman type…
Well, obviously!!
Nothing is obvious these days.
It helps to put the outrage aside and think for a minute. Breastfeeding is just coming back into the mainstream after about thirty years of being the low-class, last resort thing to do. Working women were expected to dry up their milk and put the kid on a bottle; it’s only been recently that employers began attempting to accommodate women who needed to pump milk. I can assure you that female military, fire, and police workers all have had to search out accommodations that are anything but common in their normal working environment.
Having said that, however…I don’t agree with the way the issue was addressed here. It is simply a bodily function that needs to be addressed in the working world, not some feminist “Mount Everest” moment.
OK, PN – where are all those female military, fire and police workers assigned that they don’t have access to bathrooms or other private places to express their milk during duty hours? Worked with several for whom it could have been an issue, except that they didn’t make it an issue. They just excused themselves and took care of business.
The real question is….
Did any of them breast feed WHILE attending Ranger School?
LARS?…….
I’m confused.
Am I supposed to look or do I just make eye contact and wink?
If you’re like me, you see what you never intended to see, and then you walk away quickly.
It’s against regulations to be at a political event in uniform supporting a candidate.
This seems to be very close to the same thing in my opinion.
I can’t be positive but I believe one of those children is Lars. Maturity level, inability to form coherent sentences, and utter (haha udder?) dependence on an another person. That’s Lars alright.