This is...

...My 200th post!!

It seems that for this occasion I should write something profound, and wouldn't you know it, nothing comes to mind. Ha! So instead, I'll draw your attention to this article, which I thought was so cool.

The short form of the story is that the Vancouver H&M store recently told a woman who was breastfeeding that the company had a policy against allowing women to feed their babies in the store for fear that other patrons would be offended. The woman was escorted into a backroom. As a result, dozens of women and their children arrived at the store over the lunchhour on Thursday to feed their babies. To give credit where credit is due, the store seems to have handled the situation entirely positively, and I think that there was lots of good will involved.

I remember a conversation I had with two staff members when I was working at the students' association at Colourful U. These two girls, who were both about 21 or 22 (but were really young in a lot of ways) had come down to the office all a-flutter with offence because they had witnessed a woman breastfeeding in the cafeteria. To quote: "It's disgusting." My jaw just about hit the floor that the simple act of feeding one's baby had been viewed by these two people as some kind of act of vulgarity. Once they had a chance to get their outrage out of the way, I said, as even-handedly as I could manage, "You get to eat in public; why shouldn't her child?" To which the response was, "But we could see her B00B." So I gave up and walked away, but reading this article with the memory of that conversation has made me smile broadly this morning.

For all the offensive and vulgar and explicit and sexual and raw imagery that gets forced on us every day, I just can't understand how breastfeeding OFFENDS people in such dramatic ways.

Get over it.