When a cultural shift is underway, it can often come with some awkward stages in which people find themselves in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures , all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have laws allowing women to breastfeed in any public or private location.
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However, this doesn’t mean that breastfeeding women still won’t find themselves experiencing shaming and harassment from others who find it indecent. At the same time, mothers who don’t breastfeed can experience significant pressure to do so and some report feeling like failures if they can’t.
I say all of this to say that breastfeeding remains something of a cultural battleground and one man’s story makes it clear that he has recently found himself on the wrong side of it.
To set the scene, the man said that his job provides lengthy lunch breaks, which he often spends at a nearby café.
As he explained in his Reddit post , this café is generally very busy and in the case of one day, that meant only two free seats were available and one of them was at his table.
Since the other one was underneath an air conditioner, a woman carrying a baby asked if she could sit with him soon after coming in.
He agreed but seemed to regret doing so after her baby started crying and she began to breastfeed him.
He said he avoided eye contact while this was happening, but became uncomfortable enough to ask her if she could move to the other free table.
In his words, “I’m just trying to sit here, drink this cup of coffee, finish reading in my portfolio and leave.”
The woman looked apologetic but said that she wouldn’t be able to do so once the baby had already started feeding.
Although the man didn’t press the issue further and left, he caught sight of the disapproving looks of some of the other patrons and has felt conflicted about the encounter ever since.
So he decided to ask a certain Reddit community if he was in the wrong as he knows that it’s a natural process for mothers and their babies.
Yet as he said, “I just didn’t know what to say when a random women is breastfeeding 3 feet away.”
And based on the response he received from Reddit, it seems the man was right to feel bad after what went down.
One user seemed to sum up the consensus view by saying , “This woman probably got two hours of sleep last night, has a crushingly awful mix of hormones in her body, she tried to escape and do ONE adult thing for herself, only to have to feed her crying baby and then you give her a hard time?”
Others pointed out that he could’ve moved to the seat under the air conditioner if it bothered him so much.
And as for what he was supposed to say, one user put it simply : “Nothing. Say nothing. I mean, do you usually say things to women giving their babies a bottle?”
h/t: Reddit | Chance_Object_7968
