I came up with the term Lactaboobiephobia after I had a few breastfeeding photos taken off of my Facebook page.
This was back in 2012. I was banned from Facebook for 24 hours because of one of the photos.
Facebook has thankfully changed their policy on breastfeeding photos since then, but women are frequently having their breastfeeding photos reported on Facebook.
In fact, I had a few different people contact me today asking me to take down photos that I posted yesterday. They complained they were “sexually explicit”. Give me a break people. It’s just a lactating boob.
All of this lead to Anna Kaplan conacting me after she found my blog on being banned. It has since been turned into a documentary as part of "The Booby Trap" films she is producing.
Watch the trailer here. (Post continues after the video.)
I am incredibly passionate about the topic of breastfeeding in public.
I have three boys and have breastfed them all (still feeding my youngest boy). Over the last nine years I've been breastfeeding my boys in almost every public space you can imagine.
When my middle boy was just one-week-old I was asked to go breastfeed him in the toilet while I was eating in a cafe. The owner obviously did not like the fact that I was breastfeeding in his cafe, so he asked that I head down the hall to the disgusting public toilet and feed him in there.
This was a horrible experience to go through and I don't want anyone else to have this same experience.
Breastfeeding needs to be normalised in our society. The only way this will happen is by breastfeeding whenever and wherever we happen to be. The more it's seen, the more normal it will become. I long for the day when we are not even talking about this "issue" because it's just normal.
Making the film really confirmed what I had already been seeing over the years. Not only has the sexualisation of breasts seriously changed our beliefs about what breasts are for, but we don't even realise on a conscious level how this has happened.
Lactaboobiephobia is something that not only non-breastfeeding people have, but breastfeeding women struggle with it as well and feel self-conscious when breastfeeding in public. While there are stories in the media frequently about breastfeeding in public, what gets lost in this is the message on how much women struggle on a day to day basis with the simple act of breastfeeding in public.
Everyone involved with this film feels that it's an important issue that needs to be kept in the spotlight until it's normalised and can stop being a topic of discussion.
In many parts of the world, this would not even be talked about because it's just a normal part of their daily lives.
You can check out Milk Meg's blog here.