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“Baby-Bagging Incident Sparks Calamitous Hubbub on At Least One FB Page!”

I was passing on some baby things to a friend who works downtown and lives in the suburbs. We’d hatched a plan to have Ed meet her with the stuff at lunch so she could bring it home after work. He took one look at the giant, heavy bags and said there was no way a pregnant woman could carry that stuff home on the subway. He was probably right.

But I decided to snap a picture of the bags and send it to my friend to see what she thought. I didn’t seem to have her phone number in my contact list, so I thought I’d send it as a private Facebook message. That didn’t work out very well and it posted to my wall instead. Oh well, I thought, I’ll just listen to Ed and drive out to see her soon. Nobody’s going to notice a picture of a couple bags on my wall. And then this happened.

And then this happened! A satirical tabloid-style news report on the incident by theĀ hilariousĀ Sean Kelly Keenan:

Dying. I’m still dying.

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About Time, Unbaby.

Apparently there’s been some sort of backlash against people that are always on about their babies on social media. This Tracy Moore post on Jezebel specifically addresses the unbaby.me Facebook app that is meant to block baby pictures from coming up in your news feed. All I can say is, I KNOW.

AND ABOUT TIME!

What is wrong with these people and their incessant obsessions with their babies? It starts before the baby is even born, endless strings of bikini clad profile pics replaced by swollen belly shots. It’s like their whole identity is engulfed by the size of their bellies instead of the normal and healthy fixation on their waist to bust ratio.

Then the drooling poop machine is actually born and it’s an endless stream of limp-headed baldies staring off into space. God help us all when the babies actually start doing stuff. Baby in a half roll! Baby sits up! Baby gums a bagel! Baby stands up, barely.

These people don’t even take a yoga class without their baby. The only diets they care about are baby-led vs home-made, organic. Forget about ever finding a decent keg stand photo on these people’s pages ever again. Forget about anybody “liking” your rant in favour of baby-free brunches. Forget about ever getting to talk to them without a mother effing sandbox withing spitting distance. Forget about a conversation in which spit doesn’t come up.

And then what do some people do with the free time that they DO HAVE? They start a self-indulgent, sticky-sweet, vomit-inducing MOMMY BLOG. Because Facebook and Twitter and tumblr aren’t enough? Now you need to own lilysmommy.com in order that even more broadband can beĀ dominatedĀ by pictures and stories and OMG video of your bratty kid?

It’s enough to make you want to grab them by their spit-up stained collars and shout, “What happened to your Bachlorette recaps?! Those were worthwhile!” “You don’t even know when there’s a half decent shoe sale anymore!” “What do you mean you might not go back to entering virtual mountains of data into a ten-year-old PC in a beige cubicle for 8 hours a day? Do you even know who you are anymore? What about your career?!”

So thank fucking god for the programmers and developers who came up with a way to keep the endless stream of baby babble at bay. Hey mommies, we don’t want to block you, just everything you now care about.

Let me leave Ā you with the most recent pictures I can find of me enjoying myself without my kids around. (So what if they’re over ten years old? They still count!)

 

Now those pictures reallyĀ capture what I’m all about. Too badĀ that’s it, though. There was no Facebook before I had kids. I know!

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Facebook Deletes Nursing Wear Page

Did you think Facebook didn’t need to #suckit anymore? You were wrong.

Momzelle is a successful, small, local Toronto business run by the sister-brother team of Christine and Vincent Poirier. They sell made-in-Canada nursing tops that are specifically designed to allow for comfortable and discreet breastfeeding. While Momzelle does have a small store-front location (1593 Dundas St. W.), the bulk of its business is in online sales. So of course it had a Facebook page to help promote the nursing wear and breastfeeding in general. The page posted positive quotes about breastfeeding and informative news links and boasted between 600 – 800 weekly readers and 1600 fans.Ā  It also had pictures like this:

Christine received a form email from Facebook on Monday afternoon informing her that her page had been taken down for not following the rules. It either promoted heinous hatred, personal attacks, or obscenity. Christine promptly replied to the email stating that there must be some kind of mistake and filled out a complaint form. At the time of writing this post, 30 hours later, she had yet to receive a response.

So what gives? Clearly, there is nothing offensive or obscene about the kind of image posted on the Momzelle Facebook page. In fact, the entire point of the nursing wear is to allow women to breastfeed discreetly and not have to expose their breasts. Christine is confident that no actual person working at Facebook could have viewed her page and deemed it obscene. It must be that some Facebook users have reported the page as “sexually explicit,” she speculates, and that after a certain number of reports a robot automatically takes down the page. “I love Facebook,” Christine told me. “I advertise with them. I can’t believe this is a real Facebook decision.”

The struggle for Christine and Vincent now is twofold. They need to get Facebook to hear them and have an actual person review their page and hopefully have it reinstated. They also need to address the problem of broader acceptance of public breastfeeding. The fact that any number of people would report a page like that is mind boggling. It also goes to show that rejoinders that claim that women just need to cover up and be discreet are often false in themselves. The very idea of a baby suckling on its mother’s breast is enough to offend some people.

When she first got the email, Christine couldn’t help herself. “I felt so shamed, like I was told to get out of a restaurant.” Which is, of course, exactly what her product is designed to avoid.

257,747 (and counting) people have already joined the Facebook group Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene! (Official petition to Facebook). You should join too.

Update: Momzelle has a new Facebook page up and running now. They could sure use some more likes.

Update: Thanks to a influx of support, Facebook has reinstated the original Momzelle page.

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Public Breastfeeding: Sex, Breasts, and Facebook

My mother breastfed all four of her children. And her mother before her, and so on. I am incredibly fortunate to have an unbroken tradition of breastfeeding in my family; and the support and understanding that comes with that tradition. Why, then, am I the first woman in my family to feel comfortable feeding my baby in public? To feed my baby at a cafe or a mall, on a bench or on some steps — wherever I am when my baby is hungry? Why did my mother duck into public bathroom stalls (can you imagine?!?) to breastfeed her babies? And what has happened since?