I’m fed up with complaints about public breastfeeding

YOU won’t be getting anything Christmassy out of me this week, because I’m nonplussed by the news that feeding your baby and having a wee are one and the same. 

There I was, warming up the keyboard to bang on about baubles and seasonal piffle, when my sense of human anatomy was turned upside down. Literally.

Did you know that breastfeeding is the same as urinating? Because it is. Jeremy Clarkson said so in a tabloid newspaper, so it must be true. I had no idea. For years, I’ve been labouring under the misapprehension that lactation was the female body producing a nutritious substance to feed babies and urination was what people did up against the wall in town centres after seven pints of Stella and a few Jaegerbombs.

Not at all. Breast-feeding, says Mr Clarkson, is natural, just like urinating. When we feel like we need to urinate, he writes, “we go to a little room and do it in private.” As we ought to when we breastfeed, he implies. By ‘we’ I mean lactating ladies. Were men the biological owners of breastfeeding, it would be televised from town squares. It would be an Olympic sport.

But back to urinating. I’ve just had a quick Google and it still means ‘expelling liquid waste from the body via the kidneys’. Not anywhere near the nipple. I’m confused. Why do Mr Clarkson, the management at Claridge’s hotel in London and comedy right-wing English politician, Nigel Farage — whose surname, by the way, is Malay for vagina — all think that breastfeeding should be done in a small private room, like, for instance a toilet? Would they eat dinner in a toilet? Would you?

It all started in Claridge’s, when a woman foolishly mistook her own breasts as convenient devices designed for feeding babies and engaged them in that very purpose. Oh dear me, no madam. Not here. Not like that.

Not those breasts in that baby’s mouth in the manner for which they were designed. How deeply inappropriate. Kindly hide behind this giant napkin. Or hide in the lavatory, where all the other natural things happen, suggests Mr Clark.

But please for the baby’s sake, try not to confuse urination with lactation or it could all go intensely wrong. Anyway, breastfeeding is fine so long as it is not ostentatious, joined in Mr Farage. Would that mean having your nipples encrusted in diamonds? Adding liquid gold to the milk? Breastfeeding on a bed of orchids?

Probably not. But one thing does seem clear. Mr Clarkson, Mr Farage, and the management at Claridge’s represent a section of (mostly male) society which is absolutely disgusted — which is just another word for terrified — of the female breast when it is doing its job. The moment it stops decorating page 3 it becomes an object of fear. Get ’em out! Put ’em away! Get lost, chaps — they are not yours. Not since you were a teeny tiny baby.