Between blotch and blok

Ah, yes, of course. Now that we live in a world where we understand psychology, we can automatically classify any emotional response we don't like as a phobia.

Has it ever occurred to you that the standards any given society imposes as normal *are* phobias, they're just the ones people have chosen to enshrine as justified?

For example, we think nothing of women wandering around in cropped tops and extremely short shorts and men in shorts and no shirt these days - both modes of dress which would have given the Victorians a collective heart attack and likely caused the poor souls in question to be arrested, particularly the woman.

The fact that I'm self-aware enough and articulate enough to describe the impact of my reaction to seeing public breastfeeding clearly doesn't say anything about whether or not that reaction is normal. In fact, I know you're bullshitting me, because I have personal experience of phobias both mild and severe, and this is nothing like them. Mental illness is socially defined: a phobia is an emotional response which causes an extreme and unusual level of distress, such that it affects your ability to function as a normal member of society. What you've chosen to overlook is that I'm perfectly capable of disgustedly ignoring breastfeeders if I choose to; I just don't think it's reasonable for me to be expected to do that. I accept that I live in a society which considers the female breast to be obscene, and I believe that in that situation it is neither sane nor acceptable to feed a baby whenever and wherever you please. And I also believe that people who choose to ignore that are hampering the progress of change in Western society's attitude to women and sexuality.

I was talking to a friend of mine who's several months pregnant last night, who told me that a number of other mothers she knows have had people come up to them while breastfeeding in public and tell them to their faces that they think it's disgusting. Does that sound like confirmation that I'm a lone, abnormal phobic to you? I never said Western society doesn't have a barking mad attitude to women and motherhood, because it's blindingly obvious in so many ways that it does - what I said was that I think screaming militancy is one of the least sane ways of responding to that I can imagine.