Tag Archives: NHS

A Celebration of Public Breastfeeding

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breast1

It’s National Breastfeeding Awareness Week, so I thought I’d pitch in with a rebuttal of some of the most common arguments levelled against women who wish to feed their babies in public, and should be able to do so without stigma.

Number 1: The ‘how would you like it if I just took a shit wherever I liked?’ argument

poop

“Oh, that’s interesting,” comes the familiar sarcastic cry from the army of mammary-phobic morons inexplicably allowed to walk our streets unsupervised, “Breastfeeding is a biological function, and so is defecating, so why is one okay in public, and the other isn’t? In fact, since pooing is an almost inescapable daily necessity, shouldn’t we be more supportive of street-shitting than we are of breastfeeding?” They say it with a self-satisfied smirk, believing themselves to have constructed an argument worthy of Plato. ‘Defend your gross act of nipple-sucking now that I’ve lumped it in with jobbies, you Guardian-reading heathen’, their eyes seem to say.

This is a bullshit argument brought to you by the same people who brought you: ‘Letting gays marry? Well why don’t we just allow people to marry their pets?’ If you can’t see the distinction between the process that allows us to eliminate waste from our bodies and the mechanism that enables mothers to provide their offspring with life-boosting nutrients then your high-school biology teacher has failed you, and they should be redeployed to the McDonalds’ serving hatch immediately. Also, you’re a fucking moron.

We are compelled to poo in private, in dedicated, enclosed areas, for the sake of good hygiene and for the good of public health. If the streets were awash with excrement, as once they were, the NHS would implode as it scrambled to find enough cash to treat a hundred million cases of pinkeye a year. We’d all have diarrhoea, all of the time, and our children would go blind from munching on an unknowable number of poisonous people-pats left dotted up our streets like cats’ eyes. Breastfeeding, on the other hand, doesn’t pose any risk to human health or safety. No-one’s going to get their eye taken out by a sling-shot of titty milk, or catch some horrible contagion from a mother’s briefly exposed breast. Also, and this is crucial, nobody – save the most despicable or inebriated of us – wants to remove the stigma and consequences associated with shitting in public. There’s no pro-jobby lobby about to stage a million-strong march on Westminster waving placards bedecked with slogans like “WE’RE DESPERATE FOR EQUAL TREATMENT”, “SQUATTERS’ RIGHTS” or “WE WILL SHITE THEM ON THE BEACHES.”

Which brings us to argument…

Number 2: The ‘Fair enough, you’re breast-feeding your kid, but I don’t see why I, or my kids, should be forced to see that’ argument.

breast2

This argument is seen by its proponents as a corollary to the street-shitting argument. The implication here is that there is something inherently gross, shameful or dirty about the act of breastfeeding, and that children should be protected from this highly-damaging sight. After all, it’s a scientifically proven fact that kids who spend even a few seconds near a woman who’s nurturing her infant child can go so maniacally ape-shit for tits that they have to be brought down with tranquiliser darts and treated with ritalin and morphine cocktails for the rest of their lives, lest they become warped and broken-minded sex offenders living in syringe-littered bedsits.

I know that some babies have trouble latching, or can’t, and I’ve witnessed how gruelling it can be for new mothers – sore, sweating and exhausted – to pick up the knack of breast-feeding. I don’t seek to denigrate mothers who bottle-feed. I was mainly bottle-fed, as was my partner. In fact, I can’t think of a single person I know who was breast-fed, at least beyond the first few days or weeks of their lives. Bottle-feeding is as pervasive as it is persuasive, a torch handed down from generation to generation without much debate or forethought. It’s the method by which more and more mothers are choosing to feed their newborns, in the UK and around the world, to the point where breast-feeding is beginning to be seen as some bonkers new-age fad, the boob equivalent of reiki or homeopathy.

Maybe if more children could see breast-feeding in action, and have its function and benefits rationally and gently extolled to them by their parents or guardians, there would be a much needed sea-change in our attitude and culture. A good thing, too, because the benefits of breast-feeding are legion. For the baby, breastfeeding means increased protection against a host of bugs, afflictions and diseases; an improved ability to homeostatically self-regulate; a higher likelihood of developing good communication and language skills; and a lower likelihood of developing things like diabetes and heart disease in later life. For the mother, breastfeeding means a decreased likelihood of brittle bones and post-birth anaemia; a decreased likelihood of developing ovarian and breast cancer; a closer bond with their child, and, of course, a financial saving of approximately £600 a year.

For the father, breastfeeding means a decreased likelihood of having to fuck around with bottles and sterilising kits for six to eighteen months, but an increased likelihood that his precious breasts, those vaunted fun-bags he thought were his exclusive domain, will be off-limits for a very, very long time.

And with that tongue-in-cheek, cheeky tit-shot we arrive very aptly at the next argument…

Number 3: The ‘bare boobs are indecent and sexual’ argument.

breast3

This argument is of course connected to the previous argument in the minds of those who would cling to it: breasts are sexual, and so having them out in public is inappropriate. It’s all about context, really. Breasts can be sexual, but let’s not forget that men find them arousing – deep in their primal core – precisely because of their ability to support their theoretical offspring. Breasts don’t exist in a vacuum; divorced from their primary function, they’d be about as alluring as a knuckle or a liver. Breasts exist to sustain life, and ultimately men’s fetishisation of them is both a regrettable by-product and a corruption of this purpose.

Before I morph into Germaine Greer, let me state for the record that I’m certainly not immune to my biological impulses, and find myself rather a big fan of breasts. But, let me repeat the word again: context. There is nothing sexy or sexual about a woman breast-feeding, and if you think that there is then you belong on a special edition of The Jerry Springer Show, togged up in nappies and sucking a dummy. Do you think male gynaecologists go home and masturbate over the thought of all the vaginas they probed that day? Hunched and sweating, muttering to themselves: “I knew you wanted me to… take that glove off, girl.” Context!

If my partner suddenly whipped her top off in a busy nightclub and started jiggling provocatively I’d feel rather aggrieved, and ready to fight any man who ogled her. But when we’re in public and she pulls a bit of boob out to feed my son, hell, even a full boob, it elicits no stronger a reaction from me than were she to scratch her arm. It’s normal and natural, and if I feel anything it’s pride, and a sense of security that my little boy is getting all of the natural, life-giving nutrients he needs.

Remember, those of you who agree with or actively employ the arguments dealt with in this piece: women don’t feed their babies just to piss you off. They feed them because they’re hungry, Einstein. A breast-fed baby – up to a certain age – pretty much only cries when it needs fed, and it is cruel – and detrimental to their development – to leave them wailing without immediate resolution. Because of this, mothers don’t always have the time to dash off to a darkened room, or cover their head with a towel like a budgie at night-time, just to appease your fuckwitted, Cro-Magnon thinking. Why should they in any case? And, no, breast-feeding mothers can’t just stay at home to save you the sight, because being a full-time, 24/7 carer for a tiny human being can be arduous and isolating (as well as incomparably beautiful and enriching) and mother and baby deserve a break, and the chance to get out and about wheresoever they please.

There’s no justification for adopting a negative stance towards public breast-feeding. The fabric of the country won’t unravel. The world won’t end. But more babies in the future might just get the chance to reap its benefits. We owe it to them.

But if you really feel you can’t be supportive, then at the very least be neutral, and keep your nose out of other people’s breasts.

http://www.breastfeeding.see.nhs.uk/

The Doctor Wants To See Your Box Filled

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A few years ago, as part of my then-job, I accompanied a guy to an appointment with a consultant at the local hospital. The consultant was your classic, staid, stuffy, be-spectacled, salt-and-pepper-haired, dead-eyed psychopath of a clinician. Which made it all the more strange when he entered ‘BANTER MODE’, like some android clicking a switch in its positronic brain.

‘Yes, and who’s this with you? Marvellous. Where are you living now? Is it nice there? Good. Good. Is that OK with you? Are you happy with that? Yes, and have you had a good day?’

The doc seemed unused to, and uneasy about, chatting like this with people like us. It made me imagine Frasier Crane being trapped in an elevator with the cast of Still Game. The ‘conversation’ was stilted and forced, like small-talk by check-list. There was a good reason for this:

He had a check-list.

This he presented at the end of the consultation, complete with pen and clip-board. One of the questions was – and I paraphrase slightly due to lack of a photographic memory – ‘Did the doctor have a friendly demeanour and seem interested in you as a human being rather than just treating you like a number?’

Poor prick. On top of having to remember thousands of facts about the part of the human body in which he specialises, and trying really hard not to accidentally murder people, some little pen-pushing, number-crunching bureaucrat is forcing him to be jolly and natural with people according to a very strict set of criteria in order to satisfy government friendliness targets. That explains his banter, which I admit was perfectly natural – but ‘natural’ in the same sense that floods, turds and strokes are natural. How much are these surveys costing? And who really cares? I don’t want my doctor to be nice to me. I just want him not to kill me.

‘Ah, so good to see you. Ha ha ha, charming, charming. So, how’s your sister? Is she? Oh, marvellous, marvellous… by the way, you’ve got AIDS.’

Doctors have a gruelling enough job without having to contend with customer satisfaction surveys. Especially GPs. Imagine how horrible it must be for them to have had to listen to 16,000 old ladies per day wittering on about their sons’ new jobs; the weather; their ancient, battered and leaking prolapsed arseholes; how their daughters-in-law don’t cook properly for their sons; how ungrateful their sisters are; how it ‘wisnae like that’ in their day, and generally droning on and on and on and on and on, with neither pause nor end, because they’ve fuck all else to do on a Tuesday afternoon and all of their friends are dead. And now the old incessant, piss-scented yammerers have been handed check-lists? Jesus, that’s like handing Jason Vorhees a chainsaw seconds after calling him ugly. Heaven help our GPs.

‘I got the feeling that the doctor just wasn’t interested in the work history of my son Johnny, the electrician. He’s in that Gibraltar, you know. But I’m not keen on that wife of his, oh no. Thinks she knows it all. Never listens to what I tell her, well, she’ll learn the hard way, so she will, it’s like I’ve been saying to my friend, Jeannie, she’s the one with the bad foot, she lives doon that road that’s filled with the gays and the junkies. Well, it’s no fur the likes of me to be spreading the gossip and that, but she wiz in that corner shop the other day and she saw that yin and that other yin coming in and buying a…’

ENOUGH! No checklist, OK, NHS? What I want from my doctors is simple. If I’ve cancer, catch it. If I’ve chlamydia, get riddae it. If I’ve a dicky heart, help make it start. OK? I don’t want to be my doctor’s BFF, lol oh doccy you be my bestest pal ever pinky swear you will be lol. Right? So let’s help end this madness.

By taking part in my 87 page ‘Should the NHS conduct customer satisfaction surveys?’ survey.

Remembering Gately-Gate

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Rik Carranza (@rcarranza) tweeted a link to a blog in which the Daily Mail was given a kicking for yet another example of horrible, insidious bigotry. Here it is here: http://botherer.org/2012/07/28/the-daily-mail-and-how-an-nhs-death-means-racism-is-fine/ Read it, because it’s good. I have spoken.

And then read the following piece I wrote a few years ago about another bout of Daily Mail nonsense, this one centering on ignorance of civil partnerships rather than multiculturalism. Remember Jan Moir and the Stephen Gately fiasco?

Gately-Gate

I think it’s fair to say that the only person not aware of the Jan Moir/Stephen Gately controversy is Stephen Gately himself. The debate about Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir’s spurious and offensive attempts to link civil partnerships to death, seediness, tragedy and suicide has rolled across newspapers, TV news bulletins and, of course, the blogosphere.

Stephen Fry, Charlie Brooker, and tens of thousands of complainers to Ofcom have made their voices heard. Good old Fry, speaking out via Twitter (accused by some of orchestrating a “twitch-hunt”), said:

“I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathsome and inhumane.”

Sometimes the succinct punches possible through Twitter sum up a situation better than any lengthy diatribe. Charlie Brooker, in his excellent rebuttal and rubbishing of Moir’s insidious bile, described said insidious bile with the words:

“Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.”

And so the humanitarian and journalistic crisis I’d like to name ‘Gately-gate’ was born.

Moir’s response to this whirlwind of hate whooshing towards her across cyberspace was to conclude a follow-up article with this:

“In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.”

What naughty little rascals we are. How on earth did we manage to get the wrong end of the stick?

Let’s look at it this way: Moir is a journalist; that’s her craft; words are her raw materials. She’s supposed to be good at taking those words and putting them together so that the people reading them – even readers of the Daily Mail – can understand the sentiment and the points she’s set out to convey. But then she does appear to be the queen of disingenuousness and misdirection.

You can’t nudge-nudge-wink-wink at a tenuous link of your own creation between gays getting married and gays killing themselves, or dying on holiday, only to claim later that no, no, no, that’s not what I meant at all, I was only trying to show that gay people, like straight people, can have unhappy unions! I think we knew that already, Jan. People are people, and whenever you put them together, whatever their race, religion, sexual orientation or personality, you’re going to get a hefty proportion who don’t gel.

It’s worth looking at what Jan Moir originally said:

“Another real sadness about Gately’s death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.

Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately’s last night raise troubling questions about what happened.”

And then her re-interpretation of her own words:

“In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.”

Did I miss the Peter Tatchell speech where he seethed: ‘Give us our gay marriages, so that we can perfect your lousy heterosexual efforts; and become little gay beacons to the dream of eternal coupling; never to part, never to argue, never to divorce.’ And, anyway, having read Jan’s two statements, can anyone see any correlation between her original line of thought and the reworking? In reading the former, can you see the meaning replicated in the latter? There’s that word of the day again: disingenuous.

Nice work, though, to find a causal link in such disparate tragedies. Has any research been done into how many car accidents have involved men from civil partnerships? Perhaps wedded gays can’t drive properly, presumably because they’re all so busy trying to suck each other off as they hurtle down the motorway.

Jan continues:

“It is important that the truth comes out about the exact circumstances of his strange and lonely death… I am sure he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine. For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see.”

Em, only one small problem there, Jan. As much as I found his music hideous, Stephen never set himself up as some sort of gay trailblazer – despite her assertion that he was a ‘Gay rights’ champion’. He’d never claimed to be a role-model for anyone. In fact, he only came out when someone went knocking on the door of The Sun. He was just living his life. He never preached on morality, never got himself in the newspapers every week – or even, latterly, every year – never rubbed any aspect of his life in anybody else’s face.

But even if the coroner’s verdict turned out to be ‘wrong’ (which it clearly wasn’t) or, as she still slyly maintains… in fact, let me interrupt my own sentence there so that I may reproduce some of Jan’s words verbatim. It’s easier, because she does most of the work for you:

“…it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death – out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger – did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.”

Yes, because the innumerable heterosexual people I’ve known, or read about in the newspapers, who do on a regular basis the things that Moir outlines in the paragraph above are forever keeling over like poisoned canaries.

But even if the coroner was ‘wrong’ what happened to Gately is still none of my business, the public’s business or Jan Moir’s business. I suspect that Jan Moir, and certainly a hefty proportion of Daily Mail readers, would have found Gately’s private life ‘more than a little sleazy’ and ‘different and dangerous’ even if it was proven he’d only ever had wholly monogamous relationships, and healed the sick and the lame in his spare time.

But, again to hammer home the point: even if in the hours preceding his death Gately had parachuted through the hotel room window, naked and erect, straight into the waiting bottom of the Bulgarian man, while his partner videotaped it, it still wouldn’t have been any of Jan Moir’s business. There’s no case to answer.

Some said Charlie Brooker was being a typical reactionist, muddled leftie in calling for people to complain to Ofcom in their droves: ‘He’s always banging on about free speech and the Big Brother society, isn’t he?’ you can hear them say, ‘Why is he now trying to silence this woman just because she’s coming out with stuff he doesn’t like? He’s a hypocrite, isn’t he?’ Not quite. Look at what Charlie actually said:

“Jan’s paper, the Daily Mail, absolutely adores it when people flock to Ofcom to complain about something offensive, especially when it’s something they’ve only learned about second-hand via an inflammatory article in a newspaper. So it would undoubtedly be delighted if, having read this, you paid a visit to the Press Complaints Commission website (www.pcc.org.uk) to lodge a complaint about Moir’s article on the basis that it breaches sections 1, 5 and 12 of its code of practice.”

This is clearly more about just desserts than censorship. The Daily Mail, hoisted by its own petard. What’s good for the goose…

Vote for the Dinner Party

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'More jelly and ice-cream, Sir Rich Cunt?'

So, a rich, elitist politician in a corrupt capitalist society offers rich CEOs and horrid right-wing sister-fuckers the chance to influence governmental policy for money? The only thing surprising about the recent Cam-for-Cash revelations is our surprise.

Here we have David Cameron, a man whose face tells the story of a weird genetic experiment to meld Buzz Lightyear with a posh monkey-nut, preaching about the Big Society at the same time as he does his utmost to dismantle it. Well, the peasant part of it, anyway.

Goodbye, NHS. It’s OK. Poor people don’t need hearts or kidneys, anyway. That’s a scientific fact. Cheerio, provisions for the old and skint. Want to keep warm, working-class OAPs? Why not make a fire and burn all of your old copies of ‘The Socialist Worker’? You’ll be feeling your fingers and toes again in no time. Auf weidersehen, rights of disabled people on benefits. I know one thing that will help your broken back and crippling depression: a little stint stocking shelves for free down at Tesco, your local, friendly greengrocer.

'Gonnae nonny nonny no dae that?'

Cameron’s been robbing from the poor to give to the rich (and extorting the rich to make the rich richer) from the start. This Cash-for-Goujons debacle is the least of the coalition’s misdeeds. You know a regime’s got a problem with image when its antics begin to make Tory-punching, problem-drinking, schoolgirl-shagging, nutcase’s-nutcase Eric Joyce look like a folk hero by comparison. And, worst of all, I’ve just imagined Eric Joyce decked out in green tights prancing around a forest.

What will we, the people, do? I know what they’d do in France: start burning sheep until Cameron stepped down. But not here. We are the sheep, and we’ve not the wit to realise that the whiff of lamby barbecue in the air drifts from our own scorched backs. We’ll forget this story, and the next one, and the one after that. That’s if we’re watching at all. Isn’t Eastenders on?

That's the smell of you being fucked.

We live in a country where vile politicians who trade in misery are re-elected time and again, while the people who play baddies in soaps get soup cans hurled at them in the street by angry old women years after their career has ended. ‘How could you cheat on oor wee Deirdre, ya animal!’

Politicians have the power to decide how we live and die, but we all find it… well, pretty bloody boring. Certainly not as exciting as the prospect of a nutty slut getting her jubblies out on the next series of Big Brother. But keep an eye on live updates from the Big Brother house in Westminster. Once those old men and women in suits are certain that the TV viewers have fallen into a tedium-sponsored coma, they’ll stop talking about agricultural quotas and caps on this, that and the other, and they’ll turn their attentions to the REAL order of business: building a Death Star.