It was a wet morning just like any other wet morning in Kettering, Ohio. A woman driving in her Honda mini-van was doing what many other women might have been doing. Ferrying children. Oh, and chatting on her cell phone.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot. She was also breast-feeding.
Chris Cahill, 33, spotted her, called the police and then, as people sometimes do on a wet Kettering morning, decided to follow her. There is, naturally, no irony in the fact that, according to a recording of his call to the police, he continued talking on his cell phone while he performed his super-sleuthing duties.
Although you might enjoy her alleged response when the man tried to suggest she was not following the best guidelines for a safe and happy life: "You want to pop your titty out and breastfeed this kid?" Surely you can feel her pain.
When it's wet, please pay extra attention to breast-feeding drivers chatting on their cell phones.
(Credit: CC Woodley Wonder Works)When police finally caught up with the woman, who has been identified as 39-year-old Genine Compton, she allegedly had a simple explanation. She was not going to deprive a hungry child.
Unfortunately, she may well be deprived of some of her hard-earned cash and personal freedom, as she was charged with child endangerment and unlawful restraint.
In a somewhat surprising twist of the legal wheel, Compton has entered a plea of not guilty.
I have, thus far, not been able to ascertain if she has a Facebook page.
I am not sure how you feel about breast-feeding in public, but Facebook seems to have made its views very clear.
The site had something of a contretemps with Heather Farley, a Facebooker who posted photographs in October of herself feeding her new baby. She was, at first, bemused when the photos were removed. So she put another one up, only to receive a note from Facebook threatening to remove her from Facebookdom.
Her sin, explained Facebook, was not the actual image of breast-feeding. It was the visibility of her areola, the dark area around the nipple.
A Facebook spokesman named Barry Schnitt said that this is not a question of obscenity. Rather, he said, it is one of safety. Teenagers, the argument seems to go, use Facebook and one mustn't expose them to images that might inspire their baser, basic instincts.
Ms. Farley was not terribly impressed and created a Facebook group called Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!.
On the group's Facebook page there is a declaration that "on December 27th, 2008 over 11 000 people participated in our first ever M.I.L.C. (Mothers International Lactation Campaign) event. Participants from around the globe joined our virtual protest of Facebooks discriminatory practice of arbitrarily and randomly removing breastfeeding pictures from member profiles and albums, classifying them as obscene content."
The page also contains a breast-feeding picture with some rather suspicious shadow, as well as a link to some of the banned photos. None of which strikes me in the way that certain images of the exposed human body have occasionally struck me.
One's mind finds itself forced to consider how Facebook got to look at these pictures in the first place. It seems that some people actually contacted the site to complain. Yet if these pictures were only exposed to friends of the feeder--yes, the friend feed--are we to assume that one of the feeder's virtual buddies was really upset and contacted the site?
In which case, if I were the breast-feeder, I would try to find out who these supposed friends might be and de-friend them, defrock them, or whatever suitable social castigation there might be.
On the other hand, could it be that Facebook has appointed a pimply-faced breast monitor to stalk mammary overexposure wherever he may find it? That would surely be a sad day for humanity and its ability to socially network.
Meanwhile, the Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene! group has over 81,000 members. How many days will it be before the Got Milk? people try to sponsor it?
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