It’s a bit of a side point but while I’m not contemptuous of trigger warnings as a concept because I think they were, originally, very kindly meant, I sincerely believe they’re crippling women. They’re a road to self-flagellating levels of aimless, counterproductive empathy, in particular because it’s definitionally incredibly subjective where is reasonable to draw a line between “needs a trigger warning” and “doesn’t need a trigger warning”, and it’s basically inevitable that the people whose voices are loudest during those conversations are the ones with the most extreme views in that regard. People very enmeshed in their own trauma are often — very understandably! — extremely myopic, and I think as a society we’ve got a bit tangled up in this idea that experience of something necessarily means that someone is ideally equipped to determine which system works best for everyone.
The only way, IMO, to get close to a subjective standard (and even here there’s some room for argument) is to go for a system where things that would be considered distressing for most people – either generally or, if in a specific group, then in the particular context of that specific group — get a trigger warning, but other stuff doesn’t. Breastfeeding is not an inherently distressing subject. It’s not RARE to have trauma or sensitivities around it, but it’s also not rare to have trauma or sensitivities around pregnancy, and pregnancy is how literally all of us got here. It’s obscene to impose the need to self-censor on people talking about pregnancy, and also just pragmatically ridiculous.
Someone I know wrote very movingly a while ago on this whole subject, after having suffered several miscarriages in a row (one quite far into the pregnancy) in a desperate bid to have her first baby. She said that at the peak of her misery and anxiety, she would step out of her door onto the busy street, or go for a coffee and look at the waiting queue, or turn on the news and see coverage of various world leaders shaking hands with each other, and every person she looked at, she would get a pit in her stomach and miserably think “you were the result of a successful pregnancy”. She said it was this that made her realise that it could only ever be her responsibility to deal with her trauma, and other people ultimately owed her nothing more than tact, because what can anyone do to accommodate trauma associated with simply seeing other human beings and knowing that they were once successfully brought to term - burn down the entire world?
Breastfeeding falls into a similar category really. There are basically two possible outcomes of forcing constantly cautious discussion of it - either you tabooise it, in which case no mother is really free (and make no mistake - men are not forcing this tit on each other), or, far more likely, it doesn’t really take off as a custom, so you’re doing a total disservice to everybody that gets used to being constantly accommodated in this way, because as soon as they get out into the wider world, they can’t cope. Worth remembering too that more or less every phobia treatment involves exposure, not shielding.
madness. Maybe I'm too chill. Maybe she is too. Really we know very little of their relationship, she seems very Type A and he is very Type B and opposites attract I guess.
