on gin and juice

Tonight I’m flying. When Dr S and I travel she goes a lighter shade of Irish pale and her teeny hands in baubly big rings grip the arm rests with the supernatural brute strength typically reserved for saving babies from car wrecks, etc. I’ll share a few empathetic rounds of airborne gin sodas with her, but honestly I don’t mind planes at all. I mind luggage. I mind packing it, I mind carrying it, waiting for it, setting it down and briefly losing it, etc. And I really mind being told by strangers who don’t know my needs and wear ill-fitting navy blue uniforms what I can or cannot have in it.

And I am of course no new parent, but I am some ticked about the minor special-interest piece in the Globe today about the flyer who had to dump 1.5 litres of BREAST MILK she had dutifully pumped while at a conference because, of course, security wouldn’t let on board with it because her infant wasn’t with her because, you know, she was on a BUSINESS TRIP and left the babe home with Dad and a fridge full of pre-pump.

Going without perfume, hair products, and self-tanner every time I go away so that I don’t have to check my bags is, in my opinion, a womanly and unpleasant experience that I just have to endure for the sake of my inner impatient demons. But refusing to let breast milk through security is SEXISM. You know how people are always cheaply asking about or excusing sexist this or that, like dull jokes or entrenched remuneration disparities, wondering what sexism is? Well breast milk banning is sexism. That’s the definition of sexism. Making a stupid, inconvenient rule about liquids and ON TOP of that stupidity, not thinking about how this might impact one of the two uniquely womanly productive activities on this earth is SEXISM. Only women produce breast milk, only women will be affected by banning it from air travel. (And of course the babies who don’t get the nourishment- but that’s another story). I am honestly stupefied…it’s the tackiest thing I’ve had to read about in ages. I cannot believe we have gotten to the brainless lemming point of body regulation where no one had the cajones (including the breastfeeding flyer) to say “FUCK OFF, don’t be so effing afraid of boob juice, get out of the way I’m boarding and the cooler’s coming with me.”

I feel like boarding tonight with a case of Picarroons and screeching something along those lines while wearing a string bikini.