It's kind of the basis of at least one facet of the argument... Some people find breastfeeding in public offensive, and some don't... Kind of proves it's subjective right there.

You may find the "lurkers" more subjectively offensive than breastfeeding in public, but there wouldn't be anything there for them to be subjectively offensive about (i.e., "lurk") if the mother wasn't breastfeeding in public.
(Okay, I take that back - true lurkers would probably find something to be subjectively offensive about, but within the context of this argument, we're assuming it's because of breastfeeding in public.)

And for clarification of terms, is someone a "lurker" because they find breastfeeding in public offensive, or only if they actually ogle/blatantly watch the mother breastfeed?

Thank you for making the point. This is exactly the reason why a mother should remove herself to a more discrete location: to not give the lurkers anything to objectify or complain against. This being a public place, the "lurker" has a much right to be there as she does, let's not forget. If the mother asks one person to leave because they don't like it, then don't they have the right to ask the mother to leave on the same grounds?

Is not the best fight the one you've already won? If she removes herself to a more discrete location, the baby gets fed (objective #1), she isn't the object of drooling lurkitude (objective #2), and no-one can be offended by her actions (if indeed, there is anyone around who takes offense)(objective #3), and, lastly, if someone does intrude upon her, she has a perfectly valid right to complain and ask them to leave or turn away (objective #4).

To put it in slightly simpler terms:

A breastfeeding mother should remove herself to a more discrete location so she does not offend people who do not want to see that.

A breastfeeding mother should remove herself to a more discrete location to protect herself from the people who DO want to see that.

Personally speaking, I can always ignore a breastfeeding mother if I found it offensive enough to worry about it. The point I am trying to make, that seems to keep being skipped over, is with regard to the mothers who do breastfeed their children in public, but regard being seen doing it as offensive to them, the mother. (I only assume the baby doesn't care either way.)

It is the mother choosing to feed her baby in an open, public place. She is the one consciously choosing to perform that action at that time. Thusly, it is up to the mother to modify her behavior to ensure that she, the baby, and the public are comfortable with it. It's not like someone else is telling her, coercing her to feed her baby then and there, and then yelling at her for doing it. The baby has no conscious control of the situation, so it is improper to blame the baby. It's not as if there are no other alternatives like bottle-feeding or - as I have been advocating - moving to a more discrete place. The baby can wait the 10 seconds for mommy to duck around the corner.

Parallel: People smoke in public places. Not everybody finds smoking offensive. Should people who smoke not worry about causing other people offense because other people are okay with it?

Parallel that doesn't include health hazards: Spitting. Some people just up and spit in public. Not everyone finds it offensive. Should people who spit be free to do it because some people do not find it offensive?

Parallel the third: People who are talking extremely loudly or even shouting in a public place. (Especially about a private matter.) Some people don't find this offensive. But if the people who are shouting about a private matter in a public place take offense at being overheard, who takes the blame for that? Would you prefer that the rest of the people in the public place be evacuated so that these two people can shout in peace?

And the definition of a public place is that it is "owned" by the public. (Or those who take charge of it on the behalf of the public, like the government.) I'm talking parks, fairgrounds, plazas, etc. You seem to be thinking of privately-owned buildings or business that accept the public into their establishments in order to sell them things. Those locations have the right to ask people to leave if they are making other patrons uncomfortable.
Somehow, though, I get the feeling you would oppose the owner's right to do this if people complained about it.

Answer the question, Leigh. :P

And to answer your question with a question: Is it not easier for one person to change their behavior a little bit, than it is for everyone around them to change their behavior a lot? Or do you just want the whole rest of the world to change for you?
Isn't that the exact attitude you think I/the person phoning ahead has?

Is not one of the functions of a public place to be somewhere anyone can go, no restrictions on movement or prohibiting anyone from entering? And yet, some breastfeeding mothers attempt to do exactly that - prohibit or restrict someone from moving in a public place - when they breastfeed their infant in public, and then drive away anybody who comes close on the grounds of "indecency", "perversion", or "lurking".

If you have a better language solution than English, feel free to propose it.
I hear good things about Esperanto.

Does that then follow, Leigh, that we should always put up with babies when they are tired, sick, or hungry, when they start to cry and whine, when they start to burp and smell, if they are in public places with easy recourse to more private or reclusive areas, because they have needs that should be respected? If the baby is really having that much trouble, shouldn't the baby stay at home, where care is more easily provided, and with all the privacy anyone could desire?

If the mother/parent is refusing to take their troubled infant to a more private or reclusive area when their baby is obviously bothering other people around them, then that's all on the parent, not the baby, and the parent is a conscious adult aware of the fact that they can go somewhere more private.

But if a mother/parent did want to make themselves and their baby a spectacle in a public place, they shouldn't ***** about it when people treat them like a spectacle.

Breastfeeding in public should be left up to the discretion of the mother. If such a mother is naturally shy or reticent about breastfeeding her child in a public place, it's not like there aren't secluded or withdrawn locations even in the most public places.
If the mother really doesn't care about popping her top in public and letting the world see her feed her baby, then I'm not going to raise a fuss about it. You see animals and little kids do worse all the time.
But it's the ones who sit down in the middle of a crowded place, pop their tops, and feed their baby for all the world to see, then yell at the passersby for staring, or not giving them privacy (when privacy is a few short steps away) that bug me.

Granted, there are some exceptions to this situation. On my last plane trip, I was sitting in the window seat next to a couple with a baby. The mother was sitting right next to me, the father in the aisle, presumably to give her some cover while she breast-fed her baby.
I paid very close attention to the book I was reading.

Ooo! I want to play this game! The following are only as fictional as real life dictates they must be.


Green flag: She wants to introduce me to her best friend.
Red flag: Her best friend is her cat, "Boopsie".

Green flag: She says she wants to meet me in person.
Red flag: She shows up at my house the next day.

Green flag: She says she's okay with premarital sex.
Red flag: So's her boyfriend.

Green flag: She's into the kinky stuff.
Red flag: Because Daddy likes it.

Green flag: She gave me an intimate garment for me to keep.
Red flag: I caught her sniffing one of mine.

Green flag: Over appetizers, she tells me she has a very "open" twin sister.
Red Flag: By dessert, I realize I've been speaking to the "twin sister" for half an hour.

Green flag: She reads literature in college.
Red flag: She's in a Children's Literature course.

In honor of my bro-geeks:
Green flag: She plays World of WarCraft. (Score!)
Red flag: As the Alliance. (D'awww...)

Green flag: She wants a small, intimate wedding.
Red flag: On her mother's gravesite.

Green flag: She likes to roleplay.
Red flag: As a dire scorpion.

Green flag: She loves animals.
Red flag: She loves animals.

Green flag: She's cutting down on sugary foods.
Red flag: Because the yeti in her cupboard keeps eating them all.

Green flag: She can cook!
Red flag: On her cookbook shelf is "How to Serve Man".

Green flag: She lives with her grandparents. (Sweet, in a family-oriented sort of way.)
Red flag: They've been dead since 2005.

Green flag: She says she's looking for "a knight in shining armor".
Red flag: Her friends nickname her "The Black Knight".

Green flag: She wants to move in with me.
Red flag: Now.

Green flag: She's okay with having a few drinks on the first date.
Red flag: If it's blood.

Green flag: She recites poetry.
Red flag: Her favorite is "Lizzie Borden took an axe..."

Green flag: She likes the same kind of music I do.
Red flag: It drowns out the voices.

Gods, I remember those days... The ladies couldn't get enough of the Forsaken!
Two words, baby: rigor mortis!

(It's the female players who WEREN'T scared off by that, you have to worry about!)

Eh... I'm not exactly what you'd call "new" to Mingle Squared anymore, but I figured it was about time I made an introductory thread. They seem to get a little more press, at least from the regulars. So, whoo!

My name is David, and I am a geek. ("Hello, David...") There's not much more I can say here that I haven't already said in my profile, but I'll give you some of the highlights.

I'm a geek, in a major way. I like computer gaming, comic books, literature, and role-playing games.
I'm single - never married, no kids, but these are things I hope for some day. (Someday. I've got a few good years left in me.)
I'm looking for the woman who is the other half of my soul. Kind of a tall order, I know, but I've got to keep looking.

If you've seen me prowling around these forums, you'd probably realized by now that I'm a big forum rat. I'm opinionated, arrogant, a know-it-all, AND snarky. I'm the whole package!

So in another round of shameless self-promotion, if any of this sounds even vaguely interesting to you, kindly check out my profile by clicking the name above my picture to the left. Tally, ho!

"Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it." - Mephistopheles

Please rephrase the question(s).

But if I understand the first one correctly, it doesn't. Sexual expression and erotic emotions are frequently exploded on the internet (and some people like it). The United States insists on having a free market, and that means if you can sell it, you do sell it. The pornography industry is huge and growing, by account.

For the second question, do you mean "adorable", "endurable", or maybe "durance"?

Point 1) The rigorous physical standards put in place by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines are there not to discriminate against any particular group (consider, for example, that 99 out of 100 males who attempt to complete the Marine training also wash out), but rather to make sure that the soldiers who become Army, Marines, etc, can survive the most dangerous combat situations in the world, where you may be called upon to perform any kind of physical action, from endurance hiking across the desert for days, to climbing jungle vines while taking fire from snipers.
Lowering these standards to accommodate less ability would, I think, only lead to getting more soldiers killed. That's not good for the soldier or the objective they were supposed to accomplish.

Point 2) Thought proposal: Maybe the problem in letting females in full-combat situations isn't down to the government or "The Man" saying "no". Maybe it's down to the soldiers and officers in those situations - the same ones who stand to be accused of sexual harassment, rape, and humiliating female soldiers. If all these "underreported sexual harassment" cases are even partially true, then it's a dangerous situation for female soldiers from their own side. What do the soldiers in the trenches think about having female soldiers next to them? Maybe it's the same soldiers who think that women shouldn't be in the military at all, or those who are religiously or culturally motivated to think of women as staying at home, that commit these crimes.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think you should at least be able to trust your own side. I keep seeing teams in online gaming, where individual members are stupid trolls who delight in betraying their own side. I don't want that kind of person next to me in a combat situation.

Point 3) Estelle, are you making the case that women should be allowed to join the military, so long as they stay back at base and keep the home drones flying? That merely seems like a change of venue, not a change of occupation.

Oh... women...
See, when you say "Anybody", I was kind of hoping for a free lunch... I should've known...

Speaking as a literal master of the subject:
English is crazy as hell, this is true.
But most other languages are even crazier. For example, in English you'd never mistake the word "horse" for the word "mother", like I hear you easily can in Chinese.
In English, you have many more streamlined words that cut out unnecessary vowels and gender signifiers that don't change the meaning or function of the word, but merely make them harder to spell and decline/conjugate. (It takes the French 4 separate letters to make one vocalized sound: "-eaux" sounds "oh".

In order to understand things like why something can "burn up" while it is burning down, or why we always have two words to describe one thing (synonyms for the win!), you have to realize that English is the bastard child of two separate language groups: French, which is derived from Romantic/Latin languages, and German, which is derived from Germanic languages. (Both of these languages are even crazier than English. If you don't believe me, take an introductory course in either.)

From French we take our love of diphthongs, triphthongs, and quadraphthongs (two, three, or four letters that make one different sound than either of them alone). For example, "-ng" or "-nk", "-sh-","-ph-", and "-th-", Interestingly, the word "diphthong" contains three different diphthongs ("ph", "th", and "ng"). Many of our multisyllabic words are taken directly out of French, but converted into words that are easier to spell and pronounce. You'll notice in English, we often have LOTS of letters in longer words that we don't pronounce separately, like anything that ends in "-tion", which is "shun" instead of "tee-on".

From German we take many of our monosyllabic words, or words that describe everyday things. "Milk" <==> "Milch", "bread" <==> "Brot", "God" <==> "Gott". You'll notice in the latter two examples, Ts are turned into Ds and vice versa. This is a common change when you look at cognates between English and German (a cognate is a word that sounds similar and has a similar meaning in two or more languages). Most of these words go back a thousand years or more, when various Germanic-speaking peoples invaded England and settled there. In 1066, William "The Conqueror" invaded England and brought French culture and language, which reigned for several centuries. (You weren't "cool" unless you spoke French and ate with French silverware.) English as a language was thought of as the poor man's choice - spoken by the peasants and rabble.

Then came some guy you've probably never heard of and don't care about, but if you've really managed to read this far, you should take a look at this timeline of the English language.

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/chron.html

You can see from the sheer number of changes inflicted on the language, all the abuse and trauma it's gone through, it's still pretty sane as far as languages go. It's an alloy, a mixed breed, and generally stronger and more efficient for it.
The keen-eyed among you will noticed that the timeline of the English language ends with the advent of the internet, "leet-speak", and texting. This is the way many scholars of the language feel about that.

Death Masks, of The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher.
The first major plot point of the book is resolved in about a page and a half 2/3s of the way through the book.
I'm starting to wonder if Butcher gets in over his head when he writes so many plots, sub-plots, and side plots. There are at least four major things going on in Dresden's life in this book, and his priorities are split so many ways he can't possibly achieve them all.

I can conceive of worse date disasters. I don't think the claim to want to sexually molest my feet would necessarily throw the rest of the evening. Has she even seen my feet before now? She may want to change her mind, and now the kink is moot. So long as that's not the ONLY way she enjoys herself, I think I could get past something like that.
Especially if she leaned close in and whispered it hot and breathy in my ear.
What? I'm still a man!

Ungoliant spider!
(Look it up!)

Hi, Iam!

Let's pretend I haven't actually seen all the Bruce Lee and Rambo movies... Are they anything like Duke Nukem? (THE Man's Man AND Woman's Man - all women want him, all men want to be him kinda stuff.)

--------

In a domestic setting, I don't think either party counts as "trained". If it's a domestic disturbance, say, like you read about sometimes, I think it comes down to who is more vicious and who gets the first strike in.
And to be honest, I think females of any species tend to be more vicious than the males. One of the reasons I only say these things with the protection of the internet between me and you.

I think in a domestic setting (non-military), the law comes down more to who is the aggressor than who has a weapon. "Self-defense" is a strong and easy claim to make as long as you don't actually kill the supposed aggressor.
But there is an important difference between the law and public opinion/outcry.

For (military) sparring with martial arts, with the proper training (so I hear), the strength of your opponent doesn't count for nearly as much. You can out-maneuver and out-fight them with quickness and skill. Once both parties have been fully trained, it shouldn't matter which genders are competing.