Breastfeeding is a sacred relationship between a mother and child, where she continues to nourish it with her body. You might say there’s nothing more beautiful, unless your nursing someone else’s kid. Then to some, it’s sexual assault.
Breastfeeding calls out many complicated emotions, even when it’s with mother and child. But how did it get that way. In today’s episode we explore the sweeping cultural and societal changes that took breastfeeding from a normal part of the reproduction cycle to something much more taboo.
We’ll dig into this history to understand how these changes led to where we are today. That’s what you’re in for today, on Impolite Society
Email us your impolite questions at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com and visit our website for info about the show and your hosts Laura and Rachel.
Breastfeeding is a sacred relationship between a mother and child, where she continues to nourish it with her body. You might say there’s nothing more beautiful, unless your nursing someone else’s kid. Then to some, it’s sexual assault.
Breastfeeding calls out many complicated emotions, even when it’s with mother and child. But how did it get that way. In today’s episode we explore the sweeping cultural and societal changes that took breastfeeding from a normal part of the reproduction cycle to something much more taboo.
We’ll dig into this history to understand how these changes led to where we are today. That’s what you’re in for today, on Impolite Society
Email us your impolite questions at rude@impolitesocietypodcast.com and visit our website for info about the show and your hosts Laura and Rachel.
breastfeeding is a sacred relationship between a mother and a child, where she continues to nourish her newborn with her body. You might say there's nothing more beautiful, unless that little baby you're nursing didn't grow inside of you. Then, to some, it's sexual assault. Breastfeeding calls out many of our complicated emotions around the female body, even when it's with mother and child. How did it get this way? In today's episode, we'll explore the sweeping cultural and societal changes that took breastfeeding from a normal part of the reproductive cycle to something much more taboo. That's what you're in for today on Impolite Society.
Rachel:Welcome to the podcast that lifts the veil of polite society to explore the world of the taboo, strange, and macabre. I am one of your guides on this journey into the underworld, Rachel.
Laura:I am Lara. I am Karan. I am ferrying you to the other world, beyond.
Rachel:yes, I didn't know what you said at first, but I picked up on the reference. So come ride along with us That's another reference That's my whole life lately Um, Laura, have you heard of the term milk twins?
Laura:I have not, but that's what I call thing one and thing two. The milk twins over here. As in, my tatas! Yeah!
Rachel:Okay. Milk twins. That is something you could call your breast because they are twins. I think mine are more like siblings, maybe cousins because of the asymmetric
Laura:That's all of us. Yeah. I
Rachel:that's, that's, you know, how you know you're a natural, ah, natural. But not only is that a name for what you can call your boobies, it's also a term I recently learned about. And it means that these, that means that children, right, two or more, right, cause you need to have more than one twin, um, they are nursed by the same person, even if they aren't related because if they're related, they just be siblings. So milk twin is something where Two children would nurse from the same woman. Specifically, what I saw was sisters who would nurse each other's kids, but it could also be a caregiver who would nurse your kid or something like that.
Laura:Yeah. I mean what, what was that? Uh, wet nurses. That was literally their job. Right? It was, uh, old, old, tiny, rich folk. or I mean, I guess maybe like middle cLass folk who couldn't lactate hired somebody to feed their kiddos'cause there was no formula.
Rachel:Yeah, they probably didn't have cutesy names for it like Milk Twin, but that is a big piece of what we'd get down with. Yeah, so what is your kind of like gut reaction to that idea of somebody who isn't the biological parent of the child?
Laura:Before kids, definitely very different. Pre kids, it'd be, ew, gross. That's biological fluid. You're swapping fluids. That's disgusting. Now that I've had two children and I have at least tried to nurse both of them, failed miserably. I do not fucking care, that milk is milk, uh, I, if I had been a more passionate person about, like, the powers and beauty of breast milk, I would have totally gone to, like, a milk bank, you know, they have the breast milk banks, I didn't really care that much, so I stuck a bottle in both these kids mouths, mine didn't work out, uh, Uh, so off to the formula it goes, but yeah, I do not think that it's weird at all at this juncture in my life.
Rachel:At this point. So if I had taken your daughter, Amelia, a couple years ago when she was born and I popped her on my tit, you would have been like, that's fine. Yeah. Milk's milk. Fat is best.
Laura:Honestly, truly, I'd be like, good, good for you because I can't get mine to work properly, so go for it.
Rachel:That is fair enough. And that is kind of my thinking as well. And that led me down this huge rabbit hole because I saw a TikTok where these two sisters were talking about how they both had kids around the same age and they would like, you know, if the one needed to be fed, they would just pop their niece or nephew on their boob and they would just drink up and, and you know, it was normal for them. But people
Laura:Oh, the comments.
Rachel:Yes! They thought that that was insane. I mean, they compared it to sexual assault of the babies!
Laura:The. Fuck. Up.
Rachel:some people were saying that this could even be illegal, you know, when you get down into the core of questions. And people are like, oh, somebody at daycare is breastfeeding my kid, and da da da da da da da da. And you know, consent's real, consent's a thing, but like,
Laura:can't consent, period? Like, to anybody? Not even to their mother? So
Rachel:Well, right. Like do kids, yeah. If you grow up, does anybody want to imagine their, their mom's boob in their mouth? Probably not, but that's not, that's, that's not, that's not what matters. Right. It's about getting that kid fed. And I mean, videos of animals nursing other baby animals are wild. People eat that shit up online. I mean, you see a. A cat nursing a panda, a dog nursing a cheetah, everyone's like, Yes! Give me more of that! And that's interspecies. Yet, humans, if they are nursing a baby that they did not gestate inside of their belly, it's a huge fucking sin. You know, straight to jail.
Laura:And I, I think most of this probably comes from, I mean, especially on Tik Tok, right? It's like a whole different demographic of people who are younger. They haven't had kids. It's this association, this very diametric association of what are boobs for?
Rachel:Well, and we'll get into all that, but it's not just people who don't have kids. There's a lot of women who have kids who are in the mix as well, that it morally offends them. Morally, mortally. It's like a huge boundary, a huge taboo that is being crossed. And when you ask them why, there's not really a good answer for it, right? People can't really articulate why. And that's because it's a personal belief. It's a social moray. That we've talked about, right, for like the last four years at this point. And, you know, you'll get a lot of answers, like you said, swapping bodily fluids, hygiene, or talking about that very special, holy, holy is the right word? Mythical, mystical mother child bond,
Laura:and the reason why you can't pinpoint it and you can't get a real answer is because it's all a bunch of bullshit. That's Laura's firm line in the
Rachel:Well, right, it's a cultural belief, because when you look at it on paper, it's very pragmatic, right? It's like, you know, you gotta feed the babies. And a study of forager cultures around the world found that almost half of these cultures did engage in the breastfeeding of other babies.
Laura:I'm surprised it's only half, honestly.
Rachel:Well, yeah, I guess, and other ones, they were just more desperate for food, so they're like, I'm not fucking wasting resources on your kid. Sorry!
Laura:boobie calories on your kiddo. Hehehe.
Rachel:yeah, it's a huge energy
Laura:It is.
Rachel:but of those cultures, right? The half of the cultures, it wasn't like the super norm, right? It wasn't the day to day activity. It wasn't just every baby had all you can eat buffet from all the boobs, right? It was safer when the mom had died or maybe her milk didn't come in in the way that they'd want it.
Laura:Preach, sister! That's the life I fell into.
Rachel:Yep, truly. But still, in some cultures, that wasn't the norm. Like, babies just ate, a baby was crying, you pick him up, you stick him on a boob. Whose baby is it? Nobody even knows. That's the utopia we're all dreaming of.
Laura:Yeah, everyone shut up a crying baby by shoving a titty in its mouth. Because everyone hates the sound of a crying baby.
Rachel:Oh my god. Oh my god. It's like everybody says it takes a village, but that they don't want to enter the village's boobies in their baby's mouth. Go figure. Um, and then a study of the hunter gatherers in the Congo basin, they found that upwards of 80 percent of the babies there have been nursed by somebody other than their mom. But it turned out that that was a minority, right? The vast majority was made up by the mom, but a vast majority of the babies had been breastfed by somebody else at some point.
Laura:That totally checks that that is more the statistic that I was thinking about in the sense of like yeah It mostly comes from mom because that just makes sense But you know, there are occasions where shit happens. So can you handle this for me?
Rachel:Yeah. The moms are gone. The baby's crying. You're not going to let their, sit there and let a baby suffer. And like you said, nobody wants to listen to it. It is the worst sound a human can endure is the sound of a baby crying. So, you know, you just pop them on whoever's lactating at that moment. And the study did find that it was mostly kin, right? It was grandmothers. It was very much the norm, so how did this become such an ick for the Western world?
Laura:Cause we are so fucking prim, and so fucking evolved. Ha ha ha
Rachel:mean? And that's what we're going to dig into today, right? Because as we've learned in the four years that we've been making this podcast, four long grueling years. No, just kidding. This is a labor of love. We love this podcast. Um, social mores, they don't really have a clear explanation, right? Why are periods taboo? Why can't we eat other humans? These are all things that are like, there's
Laura:have good reasons, yeah.
Rachel:Yes, but they are a social taboo. So while we can't pinpoint exactly why they're quote unquote wrong, we can. Try to understand what's happening in the world in the culture that led to that belief. And that's what we're going to do today. And I have done the research, I've been digging in, reading a lot about breastfeeding. As somebody who's never done it themselves, I've learned a lot about breastfeeding. And there are three main reasons I believe that breastfeeding has gotten a bum rap. And these are three huge shifts in our culture that happened right around the same time that made breastfeeding go from something that was literally a fact of life to something that is shameful and needs to be done in a dark windowless closet at work.
Laura:I have some theories about what this is, but I'm really interested to see the pinpointing three interests.
Rachel:Well, exactly. I mean, I think a lot of people, it's not going to be a major shock, but I thought it was really fascinating how these three forces kind of came together at the same time. It was almost like fire catching, right? It's these three instances and they all had a very similar time frame. So let's dig into the first one,
Laura:Take me on a journey.
Rachel:based on those anthropologic studies that I talked about, we can assume there's like a 50 50 chance that our ancestors were nursed, at least occasionally, by somebody who wasn't our biological mother, but that didn't end with the rise of agriculture. It was pretty normal for the wealthy women to employ wet nurses, as you mentioned, or women who would feed their child. And there's evidence of this up until the 1920s of seeing ads posted in magazines of women looking for wet nurses, which is so fun that we can see that recorded in newspapers to this day.
Laura:And that doesn't surprise me. I think up until the twenties, that seems about right in the terms of the timeframe when you think about industrialization, like really starting to hit its stride. I mean, it was definitely already here at this timeframe, but it started to become a more A way of life, in this time frame. So that seems about right. I mean shit when I was interviewing nannies if somebody said I could breastfeed your kid. I'm like, okay You got a good diet. You're not doing any drugs. You're not getting drunk on a bottle of wine every
Rachel:And then pumping.
Laura:Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel:Would definitely be a perk in my opinion.
Laura:think so
Rachel:But, it turns out what nursing was not always as light and happy as, Oh, here's my nanny come in to feed my baby. Of course, things in our past, there's always a pretty dark side of it. And what
Laura:you're gonna make it sad
Rachel:It's pretty deplorable, I'm not gonna lie, like, I'm like pro community breastfeeding and this was one thing that I was like, uh, of course capitalism comes in and ruins it. So, what it involved, wet nursing, as it was a structure in our western culture, especially in the 1800s, early 1900s, it involved a wealthy woman posting a job, for desperate women to come in and then feed their, their children. And I'm sure in some cases there were these Helga the milkmaids who had kept up their steady supply well after, you know, weaning their babies. It just, you know, some women just produce a lot of them.
Laura:They're, they're natural milkers. They even have that like German, you know, like the under corset or the boobs just like flop out.
Rachel:I mean, some women are like posing pictures of freezers. They filled with their breast milk
Laura:had friends like that and I was like, fuck you.
Rachel:Good for you, you know, so I'm sure that that was some of the cases But the reality for a lot of these women was much more bleak So the best way to be a wet nurse was to be employed by a hospital, right? So you could like feed the babies I guess at the hospital or the sick babies. I don't know
Laura:So like, moms could have a break and go to sleep after they fucking labored for what, 36 hours with no pain medication?
Rachel:I think most people in that era were having babies at home though, right. So it was
Laura:you're right. You're right. You're
Rachel:I think these have to be the either like the dropped off babies or the sick babies or I, it just, It seems odd because I don't think a hundred percent of babies born were just like handed off to a wet nurse to suckle on. You know? So these have to be, or they were like, Pumping the milk and giving it to them. I don't know there with these hospitals There was some kind of industrial piece going on But that was good though because it was a clock in and clock out type of situation If you could not get a hospital wet nurse job that meant you had to look for private employment And this involved being paid to breastfeed for a rich woman who couldn't or didn't want to breastfeed of her own So, uh, I don't know if you know a lot about babies, but they typically do not stand by baker's hours, right? They, they live Ha ha ha ha They're not 9 to 5, punching in, punching out type people.
Laura:I wouldn't know anything about that. Are you saying that these, these freaking milkmaids, wet nurses were on like 24 hour shifts?
Rachel:Uh, yes, because that's how a lot of domestic labor worked in that time, is they moved into the house of the women they were working for, right? And, yes, and so when you moved into these houses, you could bring a lot of things with you, right? Your clothes, your pillows, I don't know, some, some things. You would bring a lot of stuff with you, but one thing that you could not bring, can you guess what it is?
Laura:Your diaphragm?
Rachel:No, your baby, your baby. So women are lactating because they have recently given birth, right? And they have a child who is nursing. That's kind of the rules of the road, So if you were a wet nurse, a lot of these families, they didn't want to deal with the one baby they had, right? That's why they were hiring a wet nurse.
Laura:Hey, hey, hey, let's not judge too harshly. Maybe they couldn't.
Rachel:Well, yeah, some women were very deeply. upset about the idea of, you know, not being able to breastfeed. But some were also just kind of like, you know what? I don't really want to do it. Like give this baby over to the wet nurse. And so these wet nurses, they could not bring their babies. So what was a woman to do? Right. It was literally choosing between starving on the street.
Laura:Oh, damn. Um,
Rachel:Or employment and according to Jacqueline Wolf, who is a breastfeeding historian, I know there was such a thing, but she is, and she's, she wrote a book about it. So I trust her. Um, these mothers would have to make that difficult decision. And if they decided to be a wet nurse, that would in turn require them to relegate their child to a foundling home. AKA. So they would have to give up their baby in order to take these jobs, which I'm guessing a lot of these women are, they're not married. They're probably young. They're obviously desperate, They're in a desperate situation. So according to Jackie Wolfe, this required, this whole structure of wet nurses was literally just the universe, a universal transaction of one baby for another baby. Because who was going to feed that baby that was in
Laura:yeah. This is getting dark.
Rachel:I talk about bummer index. That's why I didn't mean this was deplorable because man, life is bleak when women don't have options. Okay. I'm going to get on my fucking soapbox and I'm going to say. Not even just like, you know, you're going to think like, Oh, women need the right to abortion. Like, sure, fine. Yeah. Give them the abortion. But also you need to give women options to earn their own living, to have safe child care, because as long as women don't have those options, children will be the ones who suffer, And if you cannot bring yourself to care about women as people, which I know a vast majority, okay, I won't say a vast majority.
Laura:come on. Yeah
Rachel:a lot of people, there's a lot of people who don't But think of the children, guys! Think of the children!
Laura:is always my refrain especially as I've gotten older and even before I had kids But I had a very like hard stance when I was young and fucking stupid You know
Rachel:Ah, as young, stupid people do.
Laura:life is black and white. It's fine, you know And then you get older and that's immediately my refrain What about the
Rachel:Right? So it's like you need to set up women, even if you think they're harlots, even if you don't condone their actions,
Laura:Cuz it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter then it matters about the kids.
Rachel:those kids are innocents! Anyways.
Laura:Let's all breathe. Just take a moment
Rachel:And let's, a moment of silence for all of those little foundling children. Okay.
Laura:you just brought it down again
Rachel:Yeah, that's what I do. They call me Rachel Downer. Mm, mm, mm, mm, mm. No fun. No fun Rachel. Hashtag no fun Rachel. Give her a microphone and a podcast. Let go. The good news is that wet nurses, their days were limited and that is because an alternative to breast milk emerged on the scene a whole lot earlier than I ever anticipated. And Laura, I'm going to ask you, when do you think formula was invented?
Laura:That's a good question. Okay. So I've read historical novels in like the fifties where they basically, they made it at home with, uh, evaporated milk from the grocery store and corn syrup and, you know, mix that all together. so if that was in the sixties, fifties, I'm going to say night, early 1900s, that's, that's my formal guess.
Rachel:That's actually really funny that you say that because my mom was a condensed milk baby and she's functioning as an adult. But formula actually dates back to the 1850s, like the mid to late 1800s, right? Blew my mind because people have been trying to offer their babies alternative milks since the dawn of time, right?
Laura:course they have! Because if you can't fucking get food into your baby from your own titty, you're looking for something immediately to keep your baby from dying. Oh!
Rachel:Yeah, because that was the alternative and There have been found all of these kind of like crude fashion instruments and people didn't know what they were for They thought they were incense burners I thought they were X Y Z the clue what clued them in is that they would find them in the graves of infants Again, bummer index. And that's when they tested them and that's when they saw the animal milk proteins inside of it. And they realized that people were trying to like tea kettle pour milk into baby's mouths and like all this stuff. I mean, you would literally do anything. If you cut your veins open and pour the blood into them to give them life, you would
Laura:vampire, baby. I'm doing it!
Rachel:Bella Swan, you know? All that kind of shit. So, it just like, people have been trying to do it from the get go. But by the 1800s and the mid 1800s, animal milk started to get the boost, Because there was not a high success rate for kids who were raised on animal milk or animal protein before then. Granted, it was, I think, one in four died. So
Laura:Oh, one in four died. Okay. I know that's bad, 25%, but I thought you were saying one in four lived. I was like,
Rachel:And it was like, no, they actually did better. And that's because they also didn't understand germ theory. So the, the, the lings they gave them, would be filled with bacteria and all this stuff. Anywho.
Laura:and then they're like, risk? What? Huh?
Rachel:Well, they didn't know. They had no clue. That's why they're burying them with the babies. Okay, but things started getting better in the 1850s because people in France were inventing, A, better bottles and better nipples, right? So that kind of helped a lot. But then this century also saw explosion in food safety and preservation, including the evaporated milk and the condensed milk, which were made popular by the Civil War.
Laura:I I'm really jazzed about this cause I just listened to a podcast about like the introduction of the FDA and about how, uh, once we started to, condense ourselves into cities, they were like, Oh shit, we don't have a cow in the pasture to feed everybody. We have to have like a vast operation to feed all these fucking people and about how crazy that shit got before the government was finally like, Fine, I guess we have to do something about it. I have these, you know, companies paying me to shut up about it, but I guess too many people are dying.
Rachel:Well, and that was actually a big thing about these early infant, formulas, a big selling point was the powdered version versus liquid version because the powdered version can be added to water, which was much more likely to be clean and healthy than milk, which who knows how old it could have been.
Laura:shit
Rachel:Also, people have been studying what made up breast milk since the 1700s. So by this point, there's almost a hundred years, a century of research. So then they started figuring out how that they could add it. to animal milk to better replicate human milk. And that's when you started to see doctors would work from this recipe or formula to make this life saving elixir for their patients. And in 1865, the first powdered infant formula was patented. And then within 20 years, there were more than 20 other new patent and formulas available.
Laura:God bless. Save the children.
Rachel:Yeah, it was a major stride for humanity. And by the 1930s, Formula had made even more improvements, and that's when they were able to get the seal of acceptance by the American Medical Association, aka the AMA, and they were approved for their safety and quality. And this is where we started to see a turn from doctors making it individually to more of like this marketing approach where the companies would have relationships with the doctors who would then tell The, um, the moms they were working with on the formula.
Laura:And hand them a coupon
Rachel:Oh, exactly, right? Did we not all get samples, You go to a doctor and they're giving you all kinds of samples, little boxes. That's kind of one of the hacks they tell new moms is like, Oh, ask about samples and you can get
Laura:everywhere.
Rachel:Yep. Hey, yep. And so that was in the 1930s. And then by the 1940s and fifties, physicians and consumers had regarded the use of formula as, you know, very common, popular and safe substitute for breast milk. And as a surprise to no one, when that formula became safer, reliable, and accepted, breastfeeding rates began to decline.
Laura:I think that this is like an interesting time in history around this, like forties and fifties, like, okay, these formulas are safe. we think that maybe we could use them to feed our kids on a more reliable basis. It's also at this same time, again, when industrialization starts
Rachel:Ooh, don't get ahead of yourself
Laura:I'm just gonna, give you a story. So my, one of my best friends growing up, her mom used to talk about how weird it was in a sense, you know, when she was growing up in school, she had homemade bread. And it was like, you are such a fucking loser, where is your goddamn Wonder Bread? And now, you're like, ooh, I have a hippie crunchy mom and she makes my bread.
Rachel:The pit in the pendulum, right? It goes back in four As I said, formula was more accepted and more common, so breast milk went the way of the dodo, And now you might just think to that as due to women reclaiming some freedom in motherhood, being able to share the responsibility of the midnight feedings, And avoiding those bloody chapped nipples. But let me tell you, you're fucking wrong, according to scholarly academics, because women, we, women, are vain, heinous creatures. So there must be a much more shallow reason that we have abandoned the natural order of breastfeeding.
Laura:Of course, of course, it's not And to strive for any kind of equality and the sense of like not being able to not having to be tied to your child physically on your body every three hours, you know, it, it not even every three hours, every two hours, every one hour, there are women out there who use their breasts as Living pacifiers and you cannot be separated from them and God, yeah, God forbid that they actually decide that I want to be a functioning member of society and not relegated to this at this revere, but at the same time, look down upon role of mother. It's a very bizarre
Rachel:Oh, yeah, there's a lot of social complication around being a mom, for sure. But like, even just, like you said, the freedom of not being attached to another human, that could never be entertained. Because according to academics, it was what you said we're talking about earlier, which is, We were all so influenced, right, by the modernism in the 1950s, and this is what Wolfe, our friend Wolfe from earlier, the author, said, that that modernism led women away from the natural. Like, you Exactly what you said, the pendulum, or like the roundabout, you know how today we're all trying to get back to our caveman selves, our paleo selves, right? Our natural state. In the 1950s, it was the opposite. We wanted everything to be made by machines, we wanted everything to be modern, we wanted everything to be like space age. And so they said that because of that trendiness of that, People were sprinting in the opposite direction of breastfeeding because it felt like something a caveman would do.
Laura:Yep. That is ape shit. We are clean, we are hairless, we are human, and we don't participate in that lowbrow nonsense.
Rachel:Exactly. And if you pull at that thread of class and social structure in the Western world, you cannot ignore race, So there's also this kind of compounding issue at. Us white ladies of America, we're seeing African women in National Geographic with their bare breast to the world, holding a child, suckling at their teat, and that just kind of reinforcing the idea that breastfeeding was this archaic, like, savage thing. Thing.
Laura:Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel:racist at that time? They were not trying to do these things. No, those were all things that were happening But to me it just feels like if somebody gave you the option to not to go to the bathroom every two hours You'd be like fuck. No, like get me out of that. Like I want to live my life I feel like those individual benefits were far far bigger and more important than You Than this bigger, and I'm not, I'm not like that. Laura knows I'm the one to say society made me do it. But in this case, it's just like, God, it's got so much freedom
Laura:Yeah. I, you know, like you said, I mean, thinking about it away from a child and breastfeeding and all that kind of thing. Like if you didn't have to take a break every three hours to go take a piss, well imagine if you're taking a piss, took 30 minutes and you had to wake up in the middle of the night to do it. Yeah. And,
Rachel:So we basically described being a man, right? 30 minute bathroom breaks and having to wake up in the middle of the night.
Laura:Scrollin on the phone.
Rachel:Yeah, for the fo in the middle of the night, your husband's what? Forty Forty three, so he's the prostate, it'll it'll happen. He'll be waking up all night, every night, multiple times a night.
Laura:I doubt it. I think he'd piss the bed before he woke up. That man sleeps like a log.
Rachel:That's the carefree slumber of a
Laura:Yep.
Rachel:right?
Laura:Yeah, 100%.
Rachel:like it. Your little newborn baby in a 43 year old man. So that's, that's one of the elements that I say was at work. Is that when human beings began, if your boobs didn't work, your baby died. But in the past 150 years, we've had this explosion of safe, reliable alternative to human milk that fed our babies. Thank fucking
Laura:Goddamn yeah.
Rachel:And I'd say made it a better place. So thank you. Thank you science for that one But as you've alluded to in the same time there was also another huge change in the past 150 years But before we dig into that change itself, we have to understand how breastfeeding works So Laura as somebody who has gone through through the process of breastfeeding. Can you explain like, how does it work? How do you maintain your supply? It
Laura:Supply and demand bitch. That is how it works. You need to create a Demand whether that is a little tiny baby mouth Uh trying to go out at your nipple or a pump or something you have to continually Tell your titty more. And once it gets into that cadence, that's when it starts to really, really go. And it gets so much. If you've really built up that supply and demand system, once it gets too full, it hurts. Like literally your breasts are aching. They start to leak because it needs to, it needs to evacuate so it can
Rachel:to be expressed.
Laura:Yeah,
Rachel:So essentially you keep up that supply or you go dry.
Laura:yep, which means making up every three, two, five hours of sleep.
Rachel:cause yeah, if your kid didn't wake up at that time, then your breasts would eventually be like, Oh, I don't need to do it. So I am going to just kind of
Laura:Suck
Rachel:up, Yep. And this system, it worked well, obviously, here we are, we're all humans. We've been around for a couple hundred thousand years. It worked really well when babies were, like Laura, like you said, attached to their mom all day, every day. And that could be while they were working the farm, tending the land, managing the household, sewing in circles. Catching the vapors, whatever else. Yeah, historical ladies did. I'm not, I'm not a historian. I don't know what women did every second of every day. Women were with their babies up until very recently. Right? And this started to change around that same time that the earliest versions of formula entered the scene, and you hinted at it what was happening in the late 1800s that might cause a shift to disrupt the time that a mother would spend with her baby.
Laura:Industrialization baby! Bye.
Rachel:Ah, that's right, the industrial revolution. You gotta do the work, work, work, work, work, uh, do the work. Pop those kids out and get back to feeding Papa Monopoly man's coffers, young lady! No time for maternity leave.
Laura:And,
Rachel:better yet, get that kid to work,
Laura:uh,
Rachel:Get him in the mines. Little hands.
Laura:I mean, yeah, you're, you are feeding Papa Monopoly's coffers, but you're also, you're straight feeding yourself. Like that was the way to survive. It's not like an option. You know what I mean? Like that was what you had to do.
Rachel:Yes. So, women entered the work fa in the work phase. They entered the work place at this time and the trend continued. Granted, most working gals were single, but married women continued to make up a bigger and bigger part of the job market. In 1890, less than 10 percent of working women were married. But by the 1930s, 1 out of 4 were. And by the 1950s, half of all women in the workplace were married. And granted, Women be having babies without being married. Like, come on. This is the world. That's the way the world works. I'm only throwing that out because in that time, it was much more socially acceptable for married women to be pumping out kids. Almost to the point where it was an expectation that if you got married, you were having kids. So that's why marriage was important to the women in the workplace kind of vibes.
Laura:Yeah. Well, I mean, also, there's maybe another really important thing that happened in that time frame from 1890 to 1950, which is two world wars where half of the working population, no, all, like 90 percent of the working population
Rachel:Yes.
Laura:Women into the, that's a whole nother episode. I'm just
Rachel:No, but that's where you, that's where you saw the shift of work be for single gals to work being for all gals, you know, where married women had to get in the workplace and then when the men came back,
Laura:Big
Rachel:that Yeah, I mean, women didn't want to give up that freedom, they didn't want to give up that earning potential, so that's why you saw in the 50s, 50 percent of women in the workplace were married, right? Cause they, that door had been opened and you could not close it.
Laura:Yep,
Rachel:So these working ladies, the women who were working and who had kids, one thing that you could be sure of was that they could not exactly take those kids into work with them. And as we stated, when you cut back on feeding, when that demand, as your body interprets the band go, the demand going down, what happens?
Laura:you dry up.
Rachel:Exactly. So, I mean, and again, another kind of fun thing I learned. And this journey is that it wasn't not all that different back then breast pumps are also older than one might consider. They've been around since the 1880s. You could actually find them in the Sears catalog of that year, which
Laura:that, that doesn't surprise me. And I know, like, they were hand done and that kind of thing. Because latching is complicated.
Rachel:Well, yes, these were mostly existed to feed preemies, right? Because preemies are not notoriously good at latching slash. sucking and I Know this firsthand because my daughter was about a month early and even still that's not like a sumer super preemie She couldn't fucking eat for a week Like she did not she could not the whole the whole rigmarole in her mouth did not work She was fed through a tube for the first week of her life, and I never thought about it But like without that NG tube, we would have been you know S. O. L.
Laura:I have often thought about that. I'm like, if I were on the prairie, fucking dead. Dead. Everybody dead.
Rachel:Well, yeah, I would've fuckin been dead. The way my eyesight is, I would've got fuckin taken by a wolf or somethin a long time ago.
Laura:you would have never even reached a gestational age anyway.
Rachel:Yeah, I would've just, mmm, then I'd be like, Oh, what's that? Boom! God. Mountain Lion, God, sit and duck over here, but so back then that breast pump is considered an intervention like a Rare intervention, but now it's basically on every registry, which just shows the continuation of women Working right? The idea is that a when you have a baby The idea is that you are not going to be spending every second of the day with it for its entire nursing life Right that you are You Having a baby, anticipating leaving it and that's to say that ironically we've done a complete 180 from the 1950s where breastfeeding was once Something to be looked down upon as something a poor person would do, But now it's done that flippity flop and elites aka professional class women are the ones who have the privilege to breastfeed, Cause, and it shows that women who have higher education and work in white collar jobs are much more likely to continue breastfeeding because, even though it ain't easy, I'm not gonna say it's easy for anybody, any woman, right? But if you have those kind of jobs, you are much more likely to have access to a private office or an area and time in the day to be able to pump.
Laura:Yeah, relative to like what, a gas station employee? And you're like the ol you're the only one there? What the fuck are you supposed to do? You're sitting there ringing out customers, you got these things strapped to you? Grr, grr, grr,
Rachel:only we lived in a world where that was acceptable. But right, yeah, if you're working in a gas station, or retail, or driving for Amazon, or slinging burgers, you don't have access to the time, the space, the privacy to pump. And the same goes for those early working women. They didn't have a wellness room in those early factories or, you know, in the Madison Avenue advertising agency place. I just think Mad Men. I don't know why I was stuck on that. But like they didn't give, those assholes, Don Draper didn't give his secretary a place to pump. He was way more worried about fucking her. So essentially breastfeeding became even more challenging for women. I was At the same time that healthy, safe alternatives were on the rise.
Laura:Doesn't take a genius mathematician to find out why people went to formula.
Rachel:Well, and there's still one more element that we want to look at that I think played a major role in why breastfeeding became such a taboo. And that is, in itself, the equipment.
Laura:The titties.
Rachel:The tete's. Because it turns out, The grip that sweater puppies have on us Americans isn't universal. I remember the first time I went to Europe was in high school, and I went with a group of other high schoolers, and we land in London first thing in the morning, before we even leave the airport, we pick up a newspaper, and what do we see in there? An ad with full chest bared in the newspaper. And we are all So scandalized! Oh yeah, that's very common. Breasts are allowed on UK TV after 9pm. Network.
Laura:Like CBS after 9 p. m. Full titty.
Rachel:Well, truly, truly. And in the UK is actually the most repressed of it, because in the rest of Europe, boobs. Yeah, just boobs, boobs, or boobs, right? So, I mean, and that's even within the Western world. When you look outside of that, bearing breast is considered very normal in day to day life in many cultures and also was considered normal in a lot of cultures before they were colonized by our after 9 PM friends from the UK. and you know, and it also, it's just, it's so fascinating cause it varies, right? If you look at it from an anthropological. The sexual projection that we have on the breast can apply to different parts of female bodies, right? It can be the butt or the waist or the thighs or even the ankles,
Laura:Okay.
Rachel:right? Ankles are very sexy, right? And it turns out that this variation doesn't just exist outside of the Western world. It exists within the Western world, within time. So at different points of time, the sexiest part of a woman's body varied, and it did not include the boobs 100 percent of the time.
Laura:I think of the, the French revolution, you know, thing where like, she's got one titty out like obvious that that's always been a clue to me, even when I was much younger and had much less worldly knowledge that I was like, that is very different than what we would have seen in America in the late 1700s.
Rachel:Yeah, I wanna, I wanna see George Washington crossing the Delaware with just a boob out.
Laura:Well, in George Washington's wife right next to him, like one titty out,
Rachel:no, I wanna see George Washington's boob. Specifically. I wanna see, we couldn't even handle a male nipple, right?
Laura:you're
Rachel:I, or, or the Statue of Liberty just like boobs out. That would be hilarious.
Laura:That's a, great analogy. So that's the first thing that gives you a clue. Like things are not the same.
Rachel:Over here. Yes. Because even in Europe, it comes and goes, So they're more comfortable with breasts, even to this day. But there was a time in the Renaissance where your ankle or your leg was considered more sexual than your breast. And it was like, kind of like a common part of Bye bye. The clothes to like push your boobies up and if you could see like a little bit of areola see the nipple you're like Oh, you're just youthful and they're perky right? It was just a normal part and we all know about that one Mistress of the one king who had her favorite boob that she pushed up and out all the time
Laura:She's like, look at it. Look
Rachel:She's like this is my good one Every woman can relate to that. Oh the good
Laura:The good one, yeah.
Rachel:Right? So it just, it, it depends. It, it, it's not a fix here, right? We would think in America today that boobs have always been this like extremely sexual, extremely like erotic part of the human body, but that's not always the case. Not saying that boobs were, boobs were always considered attractive, right? And they've always played a role in attraction and cleavage has been a big part of that. Granted, for the most of cleavage's history in modern society, it has been smashed under a tight bounded corset.
Laura:Squished within an inch of its life.
Rachel:Truly. It's so, it's flat. It's literally flat against your body, but the little upside part is,
Laura:round bit. Yeah, it does. Especially if you're skinny. When you're fatter it's more like a slope, but if you're real skinny, and then you just push them up, it's just like these little cat
Rachel:little circles, right? Yeah, that looks great. That's that that's how people look on TV So even the tiniest boobies will look like that But then if you're like a regular sized person you got like the arm rolls the armpit rolls in there, too It's it's a little bit you look a little bit more matronly. That's where they call it That's where the word came from. But anyways, so that's what that's what cleavage was until the early 1900s And that's when a game changer entered the scene the brassiere Aka the Bra. A.
Laura:A. K. A. Torpedoes 101.
Rachel:K. A. the thing I can't wait to take off at the end of the day. A. K. A. I haven't wore an underwire bra since 2019. A. K. A. I actually have one on today, but that's because all my bras disappeared. I don't know where they went, or how they got there, but
Laura:That's the,
Rachel:could find.
Laura:that's the real tragedy.
Rachel:Yeah, that's like socks. My bras have become like socks. I'm gonna make a missing poster. Where did all my sports bras go? That's neither here nor there. Because we're talking about bras and how they revolutionized how our boobs interacted with our day to day wear. So instead of that smashed up silhouette, they can now be separated. They can be rounded. They can be lifted all the way up to our chinny chin chins. And they can also even come in fun shapes. Like you talking about the pointy ones?
Laura:Yeah, the torpedo boobies. And that's why I always say, I've heard a saying about bras. Lift And Separate.
Rachel:Separate. Yes. Yes, which is very different than the corset, which was like just smush them down and together, essentially. So, lifting and separated, we could see the shape of them better. And that changed all of cleavage and décolletage in general, right? Because, In the 1930s and 50s, which, oh, is that ringing a bell? That's a decade we're starting to hear a lot about in this episode, the bra, it enabled us to have those plunging necklines that the starlets wore and those skimpy bikini tops, which is giving that illicit combo of skin and hiding away the right amount of stuff, Cause sexiness is about, much about hiding as it is about showing.
Laura:Oh, yeah, it is. Give him a, a peek, but not the full show.
Rachel:Yeah, not the full areola, So those pinup gals of the world of the world war two of world war two They made tatas the center of attention and our lusts for busts Were just cemented by the cleavage queen herself, marilyn monroe So in that post war era cleavage really became the defining emblem quoted by some culture writer I don't know, he wasn't, I could throw his name out there, but like, nobody knows. He said, The bust, the bosom, the cleavage, was in the fifties, it was the apothesis of erogenous zones. The breast were the apples of all eyes. A. K. A. the nipples or the eyes of the face, of the breasts.
Laura:I like the nipples and the eyes and the face. I, Meryl Monroe, man, in, uh, Some Like It Hot, she wears this dress that I was like, Holy shit, I was scandalized that they would have such a dress in a, in a black and white movie. So yeah, thing, things were, were changing fast.
Rachel:People were becoming breast men, that's for sure. And that boob obsession continued in the decades following. So we saw the rise of certain periodicals that featured buxom, buxom models. you might know them, it was like Playboy.
Laura:Oh, those periodicals, those very academic scholarly periodicals. Got
Rachel:Yeah, the people would definitely pick up for the articles and not, not the tri fold centerfold situations that featured said models. So in that, breasts were becoming synonymous with sexuality. And what do we get when we silly little humans get fixated on something, right? We start to build out those. Super stimuli. We seek out those super stimuli, which has been like an, war cry of implied society.
Laura:Bigger is better! Supernormal stimuli! Rah! Dah! Dah dah dah!
Rachel:Oh, yeah, when it comes to breasts, we want it bigger and we wanted more. And Laura, you did the episode, the research for the episode about plastic surgery. Do you remember when the first boob job was done?
Laura:No, I didn't look into the history. Uh I mean, like, reconstructively, I would imagine probably in the 60, 70, somewhere in that
Rachel:That's right. The first boob job was done in 1962.
Laura:I guarantee it was a reconstructive surgery. That's how all this plastic surgery starts. And then it goes, it trickles down to us,
Rachel:they're like, wait, we can make our boobs better. And again, that decade. Does that sound familiar? That's right on the cusp of that like modern era formulas hitting the market. Women are hitting the workplace, working women, designing women, all that stuff. So from there, going under the knife has only taken off, And we are augmenting the shit out of our chest. And it is expected to be a 8 billion dollar industry by 2032.
Laura:I'm honestly surprised that it isn't an 8 billion industry already.
Rachel:Well, right, because it's a vicious cycle, right? We see the big ol fake titties in our pornography, on our sex symbols. I mean, even in our, like, day to day, like, media conception, everybody who we're looking at Not everybody there's a lot of fake titties in the mix and so women in our day to day lives They go out and get their own bolt ons and then the cycle is just cemented, right? It goes round and round and round. So in those past a hundred hundred ish years, Breasts have gone from a part of the human body to literally, in the case of the women who get surgery, a plastic sex toy that they wear around on their chest all day. And even if you don't have that surgery, your breasts are erotic first and foremost. That is the cultural shift that has happened.
Laura:Yeah, absolutely. People see breasts and they're not like, Ooh, those are used to feed babies, which is literally its purpose. That is why they are there. They are filled with all these mammary cells and glands to pump out the milk. Nobody fucking thinks about that anymore. They're just like, boobs, sex, sex, boobs, boobs, sex.
Rachel:And it's yeah, and it's not a universal, right? Like in the research I did, other cultures have related that where they will consider Americans perverse by how fixated we are on boobs. It's considered a fetishization or like, yeah, exactly. So it's not the norm, but it's no stretch. Like you said, it's no stretch to understand how this infects breastfeeding,
Laura:Yeah, no genius to take that mental leap. It's like, it's something for babies and for me to fuck? This can't be true!
Rachel:Well, exactly. And especially since babies are the most precious of us all. Right? So here is my take. And I hope it's a good one. I think that's probably what everybody else has landed on at this point. When women were leaving their kids more for work, right? They had to, it was a matter of life, for freedom, blah, blah, blah, blah. It made breastfeeding harder to accomplish, which is already something that was hard enough. Kids died from it all the time already. So when you add on these new strains and these new pieces, these new things that are pulling mothers away from their babies, that means that they had to turn to these new breakthroughs that were not only available, but also exciting and like fresh and reinforced through society.
Laura:Space age! We're in the space age!
Rachel:modern, you know, leave our hunter gatherer roots behind. Like, these are new, they're cool, they're healthier. I mean, it's no wonder that women were turning away from breastfeeding. And so, in this time, when you're seeing less and less breastfeeding, and that's not just like in public, that's in your home, right? Your wife isn't running around with chapped nipples, like hanging out and her boobs swollen, because she's not breastfeeding. She's wearing her blouse. in her brassiere and all of these things and you know, it just, you're not seeing it, you're not encountering it. Breasts aren't for feeding babies, you don't see that, but what are you seeing breasts for?
Laura:Pearl necklaces.
Rachel:Well, right? Boobs became a thing for sexual pleasure at the same time and there's no doubt that our culture is obsessed with boobs and when you think of them as sexual, suddenly it's a lot harder to rectify the idea of shoving them into the mouth of our sweet innocent babes.
Laura:Yep.
Rachel:So we could get kind of around that when we think of this like mental dynastics of the magic of motherhood, right? Like that, that can solve a lot of wrongs. People just love that shit,
Laura:Just rub some of that mythical magical womanhood on it and just
Rachel:but yeah, yeah, it's motherhood. It's, it's its own thing. It's like, you know, you poop on the table. It's beautiful. Um, But, what gets to the original crux of the story, is that when it crosses that into somebody else's kid, right? When it's somebody who didn't give birth to the kid, and when it's their nipple in the mouth of the baby, That's when it becomes sexual assault because we've seen boobs as Sexual organs for so long and that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
Laura:I think that that is a fantastic theory. They're like, Oh, this mythical motherhood magic. If it's not actually your child, we have to wipe that veneer off. And then we're stuck with the thought that boobs are not actually for sex, that they're actually for feeding babies. I don't like that. So I'm going to reject that and then just go for, again, titties are for me.
Rachel:well just like yeah boobs are sexual boobs are sexual unless that baby has magically sprung from your loins And then if you are somebody who did not grow that baby You might as well be shoving a dick in its mouth that baby's mouth. Isn't that horrible? But I feel like
Laura:That's, yes, no, I mean, you're right. If you're going to call it sexual assault, that's pretty much the equivalent and it's not equivalent, not in the fucking slightest.
Rachel:Like people, I get on my soapbox, people will say that adoptive parents, like adoptive moms, because it's always the moms, nobody really cares about the adoptive dads. They're scoff, scoff, scoff free. It's always the mom issue, both the birth mother who plays the child and the adoptive one. They'll like get mad at moms who decide to breastfeed or induce lactation and that's That's even more of a taboo because you're not even a natural mother at that point. Oh, yeah, it's like you're just and then they will call it sexual assault. They will get mad about the forced bonding and I'm like,
Laura:Fuck off! You mean the forced bonding of nature? That is a child that says, I need love, and nourishment, and holding? Oh yeah, fuck that forced bonding. Let's just put it in a closet, and let it
Rachel:Well, that's the thing. It's like yeah, unfortunately that child is adopted by that mother, you know Like whatever your feelings are around adoption like that has happened Why would you not want the baby to bond with the parents? So that it could have a more secure attachment. It just drives me wild. And so there's a, yeah, there's a lot of misogyny wrapped up in that kind of stuff, I think, because there's a lot of misogyny around women who are shirking their mythical responsibility of mother, which I mean, granted. I'm not, that's not me saying that, that's what people are saying. Um, I think any woman should have the right to not be a mother at any point, but it's also like the misogyny of women who can't have their own children being quote unquote useless to the patriarchy, so there's a lot of anger at them, there's a lot of anger to all the women involved in the adoption equation.
Laura:many levels of you are not doing exactly what I want you to do, and I am mad about it.
Rachel:Yeah, so if you are inducing lact And and I can sit here and talk about this for this whole episode and throw in the idea of inducing lactation, which our people probably have never even, they didn't even know you can do. But men could, men can induce lactation to feed a baby. people who are born with a penis.
Laura:just like the way you say it. So I, let me clarify just one question though, because I always thought this was true, but to be fair, I have not looked it up, but if you have lactated once,, if you then create supply and demand again, your body will kick that back up.
Rachel:Yeah, so I think for women who have breasts, are individuals. I meant close that. For they, thems,
Laura:let's just do it. Okay. Thank you. Nope, Ma Laura's just saying women. Go ahead, continue.
Rachel:if you have, I think it's, I think you can do that. But for people who want to induce it who have not had the biological process of pregnancy, it involves taking hormones that I think are just basically birth control. Because birth control tricks your body into thinking it's
Laura:It's pregnant, I was just always wondering, I'm like, can I hook a breast pump up to me and, like, start pumping out? And, like, how many calories can I expend in a day? I I I gave my breast pump away. I should bring it back.
Rachel:Yeah, but you would just have to do it every two hours to instigate the lactation. Well, yeah, that's another reason why, like, if anybody wants to induce lactation, I'm like, that's the more power to you guys. It's a lot of so, again, social stigma around it, but if you're gonna wake up every two hours before your baby's even born for three months going into it to induce the lactation, that's like, you're obviously not doing that for yourself. you're doing it because you think it's, you know, You think it's what's best for the kid. And there's a lot of benefits around breastfeeding. Granted, people who are anti induction of breastfeeding will say that you don't get the colostrum, you don't X, Y, and Z, meh, meh, meh, meh. But I just, yeah, anyways, that's, that's, people get really weirded out when it's not the biological mother's nipple in the baby's mouth. And that's what is the whole point here, is because we think boobs are for sex.
Laura:Just like a dick is for sex. No.
Rachel:yeah, exactly.
Laura:It's just nonsense. I mean, I think that in, you listen to this whole episode, you can obviously tell Rachel's and I very strong stance on this whole thing. It's just fucking nonsense. Fed is best, whether it comes from a bottle, a, a, your titty, a stranger's titty. just,
Rachel:right, yeah, as long as you can ensure the safety of the stranger's milk. And I'm not even, like, I'm going to say, like, I would prefer, I would have preferred breast milk for my kids, but that just wasn't in the equation.
Laura:the fucking breast milk banks are outrageous. They're so expensive.
Rachel:well, yeah, the, and the banks are the ones that ensure safety. Um, you could do swaps on Facebook, but I just could not bring myself to do it because I didn't know what those women's swaps were.
Laura:yeah, totally.
Rachel:Or like, and I'm here saying like, Oh, it's fine to do it with women. You trust, right? Like
Laura:Yes.
Rachel:that trust
Laura:Like a sister! Oh my gosh, right back to where we started! Like
Rachel:exactly. Perfect. Perfect symbioticism. But I will say my only complaint about breastfeeding, I just want that. This out there for the record. My only complaint about breastfeeding is that when I'm out in public and I see somebody holding a baby, I'm like, Ooh, baby. And I want to look at it. And sometimes they're breastfeeding and it looks like I'm trying to look at their boob. And I'm just like, no, I just want to see your sweet baby's face. And as soon as I realized what's happening, I'm like, look away. But I, it's happened to me more than once where I'm like smiling, like, Oh, I don't like peering in. And then I see that their shirts, like their shirts down. I'm like, Oh fuck Rachel, the pervert.
Laura:I honestly, I wish I had the opportunity to experience this. I never, I mean, I barely could breastfeed my kid at home, let alone in public.
Rachel:yeah, that's honestly the biggest perk, especially of breastfeeding too, is just being able to feed your baby whenever, wherever.
Laura:No bottles,
Rachel:Yeah, not, you don't have to
Laura:no fucking dishes. That's really, that's
Rachel:yeah, just pop them on. I'm jealous of people who do breastfeed and can breastfeed. I'm like, mmm,
Laura:hmm.
Rachel:that seems nice.
Laura:Yeah, less dishes. I'm always for it. Yeah,
Rachel:cost. Anyways, yeah, you have it super easy, breastfeeding moms. Stop complaining!
Laura:yeah, yeah, yeah,
Rachel:Yeah, just kidding. Um, but as I mentioned, it's never polite to stare at a breastfeeding mom, but you know who it is okay to stare at? Us.
Laura:society!
Rachel:Please stare at us. We love your liars. So be sure to help us grow our circle of socialites by sharing the podcast with your friends
Laura:You mean grow our areola of friends by sharing the pot?
Rachel:twins. Let's all suckle on each other's breasts. That goes back to, I feel like that's like a Satan thing, but anyways. Let's all suckle on our satanic teats and grow the circle of socialites and you can do that by sharing the podcast with a friend and also please, please, please rating and reviewing us on your podcasting platform of choice because if you don't refer us, we do pop up, I guess, on people's searches and stuff and if they see the reviews, that helps us pop up more and that helps other people know. That we're not psychos, which does not sound very fair after saying we're going to suckle on each other's satanic teats, but it is what it is. You know what it is. If you're this far, you want to suckle. We got you. Uh, that's why we call people that we're obsessed with or people we admire mother, right? Because we just want to really latch on to them. It's time to wrap this up.
Laura:So send us a note, uh, rude at impolite society, podcast. com. Leave us a review, Apple or Spotify. Always remember to tell your friends and always keep marching to the beat of your own drum. it stay curious?
Rachel:You could be curious. You could be not curious. You could just march. It's good. I can't breathe good, I got the vid.