<\/a><\/p>\nending up alone in a bedroom where a baby was strapped into a car seat. At this point, an invincible curiosity about breast feeding overtook her, and in spite of the fact that she was not lactating and had no idea whose child it was, she reached into her bra to remove her breast for the infant, at which point the startled father walked in and politely took his child away.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThere’s a lot to unpack here.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThe first thing I see is blind privilege– the unexamined belief that the world is full of things for the author to act upon. But I also get her curiosity. I understand having a weird thought and nearly acting on it. I mean, Christ, everybody has to understand that, don’t they? But still, the story really caught fire. It was taken as evidence that breast feeding is still seen as something shameful and perverse. That men had to attack a successful public woman just for being a woman. That the patriarchy must be broken. That women had to support other women. It went like this, and so from the real story, which was just a dimly remembered non-event, all sorts of other stories caught fire and burned through social media. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nFunny that.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nRegardless, the Globe and Mail immediately retracted the story and Leah McLaren was suspended for a week. What this shows us, as if we needed to see it again, is that newspapers care more about their readers than their writers, which is another way of valuing the advertiser over the consumer. As far as I’m concerned, the newspaper, which is responsible for vetting, editing, shaping and publishing the story, should have had McLaren’s back, they should have supported a weird, potentially very interesting story, but they did not. And so, writers need not bother themselves to look out to the oceans of comments for enemies, but can just take a quick glance at their own offices, instead. Your column, as I was once told by an editor, is the thing we put between the ads.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lordy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[342,2132,314,79,138,4137,2489,1605,4135,1165,1224,128,399,4134,4136,562,434,151,333,4138,1233,699,38],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6317"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6321,"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6317\/revisions\/6321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}