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> On some days, I would park my car on a sleepy street in Palo Alto and pump milk with a silicone hand pump in front of someone’s nice house, reading profiles o
by divbzero 6y ago
> On some days, I would park my car on a sleepy street in Palo Alto and pump milk with a silicone hand pump in front of someone’s nice house, reading profiles of the investors in my next meeting from my iPhone. Occasionally someone would drive up, or a jogger would run by, and I would feel completely humiliated.
This is just a small bit of everything Tracy wrote. But I would love to see this stigma changed. There should be no shame in caring for your child.
Thank you for sharing your story.
- smabie 6y agoI mean, it's kind of on her if she felt humiliated. I feel embarrassed by things that no one notices and no cares about. But those feelings are a reflection of me, not society.
- lazyasciiart 6y agoNot really. They are reflections of what you have learned from the way other people react to you or to someone else.
- austincheney 6y agoHumiliation, which is different from regret, is a product of self reflection in confrontation to social feedback. That said it’s hard to blame anybody for a feeling of humiliation when it’s almost always the product of social reinforcement.
- ncallaway 6y ago> But those feelings are a reflection of me, not society. Society was the one that originally taught you to be embarrassed by those things, though. Yes, with work you can try and take back some of that control. But those things that you are embarrassed by were taught to you to be embarrassing.
- yomly 6y agoTaking a step back from her story, I find it so weird that we stigmatise some of the most universal human experiences. Essentially every person will piss burp fart and poop. And almost every person has one of two genitals. (EDIT and our biological parents will have one of each). And almost every mother will feed their baby with their breasts. And yet we have become so detached from the animal part of our identity and so caught up in some abstract values that we get squeamish seeing and talking about these things. We have much to learn on this front from our scandi and dutch friends who have chilled the F out.
- jacquesm 6y agoThis is much more of a thing in the United States than elsewhere in the world.
- jwr 6y agoDefinitely. In most of Europe things are more normal: it's normal for women to be prime ministers or presidents, it's OK to breastfeed your child in public, and at least among my programmer peers, women are regarded with more respect than men (since there are so few of them in IT). In Poland, the catholic church and the "conservatives" still work hard at enforcing the old barbaric gender stereotypes, but they get little traction among the educated population.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y agoIn Poland sexism in IT is still strong among some academic types. Not only sexism, but bags of other prejudices as well. I’d call it the „frustrated elitism syndrome”.
- jwr 6y agoReally? I have no experience with academia, but in commercial settings I don't see any of it.
- skocznymroczny 6y agoI don't really understand why the need to single out Poland. In recent history Poland had a transgender MP, openly gay MP and three female prime ministers. Breastfeeding in public isn't a taboo in Poland either.
- jwr 6y agoOh, that's just because I happen to live in Poland (most of the time) and I'm very annoyed by these attempts to "put women in their place" (usually, the kitchen, and with child-bearing duties). What I meant is that things are good, but the church and conservatives are hard at work, trying to make them worse.