I remember a banner in a demonstration referring to I don't know which minister and carried by a girl and in which the minister was warned that "O Minister, you have angered my mother!" I don't know if you got to see it but the photo copied all the covers. Yesterday, without going any further, we discovered that the mecca of the cinema had added to its list of groups that have been angry lately: African-Americans, Asians, women, ... one more and one of the most dangerous: mothers.
Why? How has it been? They have done? Well, something somewhat incoherent, I think. In an industry where the necklines of ladies' dresses can reach the navel without making any effort, it turns out that there is no room, no place where a mother can feed her child or extract milk from her breasts during the Oscars delivery ceremony. Nowhere beyond the bathroom, this reduces glamor in Hollywood when we talk about breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is complicated even at the Oscars ceremony, as if it were a science fiction story or something like that.
It turns out that by a chance of these that occur in a ceremony in which there is so much star and so much journalist, someone meets Tom Hardy, apparently nervous, in the lobby of the Kodak Theater. Obviously he was asked if it was for his nomination as best supporting actor for his role in "The Revenant" to which he replied no, that it was because of the countless trips to the toilet that his wife was forced to make to extract milk from her breasts.
Yes, there was not a room in which Charlotte Riley, Hardy's actress and partner, could carry out the breast milk extraction process. She added that due to her recent motherhood she was forced to do it almost every hour but the conditions left much to be desired. It is clear that in these matters the glamor of Hollywood shines a lot for its absence and respect for the women who need it, too.
It could be a mere anecdote, one more of this peculiar night but it turns out that there is a federal law that states the mandatory existence of a room For those mothers who either have to breastfeed their children or have to extract the milk from their breasts and in the Kodak theater that room does not exist, which means that this law is not fulfilled.
The invisibility of breastfeeding
If we do not keep the isolated case, if we add other known cases and to all of them we add the experiences of each one, we see that breastfeeding is viewed by society as an abstract concept, when we enter the practical field, breastfeeding happens to be mandatory or it seems that it is intended to be.
I am not clear about the reason or the reason but in these types of situations I always wonder who or what benefits from making it difficult to breastfeed, complicate and make it invisible? and everyone can draw their own conclusions, I think.
In those same days, in the celebration of the Mobile World Congress there was an even more unjustifiable situation. Esther went to the congress for work reasons and for family reasons she did it with her five-month-old daughter Marina. In the presence of the girl she was banned from entering the mother with her, the children do not enter and also, lady are you unprofessional for coming to an event like this with your baby, more or less with those words prevented Esther from being able to carry out her work and attend the work meetings she already had in that place.
What is so unprofessional for a working mother who is forced to attend an event like this with her baby, who organizes her day taking into account her needs as a mother, as a woman and those of her daughter as an infant? Where do they find the most rancid minds that there is a lack of professionalism?
We are light years away from normalizing breastfeeding and motherhood in general in our western society in which the concepts are sold very well but do not want to put measures to put them into practice and in which some laws are so lax that nothing happens if the big industries (like the one of the cinema, in this case) consider them of science fiction.
