There’s a post-Burning Man Instagram photo floating around the Interweb right now that has gained a lot of traction in the mommy realm. Because we are a part of the online mommy community, we’ve had an inordinate amount of people bring it to our attention in some way, shape, or form… Mostly because people seem to not know what to think about it, much less how to react to it.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, the photo is of a dusty “Burner”, in the desert, with a breast pump attached to her boobs. The Burner in question (Thinx co-founder, Miki Agrawal) accompanied the photo with a caption describing how and why she decided to pump her milk at the festival; mentioning that she let fellow festival-goers drink the pumped milk as they pleased.
The media and the whole internet apparently, is absolutely losing their shit over this. They are disturbed. They are outraged. They are disgusted. And apparently, they want to know our take on the “situation”.
So. What’s our stance on the Burning Man Boobie Milk Controversy?
WE DON’T FUCKING CARE.
WE DON’T CARE.
WE DON’T CARE.
WE. DON’T. CARE.
Seriously.
We really don’t care. And neither should you.
But people (many of them “concerned” moms) are legitimately OUTRAGED about this.
“How could ANYONE leave a newborn baby to go party in the desert?!”
Is it YOUR baby? No? THEN WHO CARES.
“Who would EVER pump their breasts so openly and publicly?”
I dunno, whoever feels comfortable doing so? Is someone forcing you to pump YOUR breasts in front of hundreds of people at a festival in the desert? No? THEN WHO CARES.
“Who would EVER drink milk from a human’s breast that ISN’T their mother?”
We don’t know. And we do not care. (Although we will say that if you’ve ever drank milk from another mammal – ahem, cows – then you’re barred from using this argument.)
The kicker is that now people are digging deep into her personal/professional life. Pulling up old law-suits and finding a laundry list of complaints against her.
All we want to know about the whole situation is WHO HAS THE TIME FOR THAT NOISE? Are we the only people out there with literally NO free time to go straight up Magnum P.I. on a woman who has no bearing on our lives whatsoever?
“Ok Rebel Mamas, so if you don’t care, then why even write about it?”
Well, hypothetical reader, that’s a great question.
We believe that owning this platform endows us with an interesting mixture of both privilege and responsibility, so when we see shit like this take over our news feeds and clog up our inboxes, we feel that pesky responsibility creep up and encourage us to do what we can to be a voice of reason for anyone who may have gotten caught up in this bizarre internet drama.
‘Cause you know what’s been on our minds lately?
The people of St. Maarten, and Cuba, and Barbuda, and the Florida Keys, whose homes and businesses were completely annihilated by Hurricanes Jose and Irma, for one.
And how about the families of the 65 people killed in the magnitude 8.1 earthquake that hit Chiapas Mexico last week?
We think about the teenage kid, travelling alone, who suffered a massive seizure beside Nikita on her flight to Dallas last month.
We dwell upon the sad reality that our friend’s 28-year-old son chose to end his life last week.
And that’s not even touching on the fact that there is a constant flood of bullshit that we have to wade through every single day in our lives as parents. We ALL have so much REAL shit that we’re up against that we really don’t understand WHY people are so willing to waste something as valuable as time and energy worrying about the decisions that ONE woman made about HER OWN BODY and the milk it produced at a festival in the fucking desert.
And while we too have occasionally found ourselves getting caught up in stupid drama like this (it’s hard to be totally immune when it’s always lurking somewhere in the shadows), we suggest that as a collective, we should all give ourselves the grace to take a moment, to pause, to reflect, and then to snap ourselves the hell out of it whenever we find ourselves getting caught up in crap like this that is just so utterly inconsequential.
Bigger fish, y’all. Bigger fish.
Feature photo via Miki Agrawal on INSTAGRAM
Burning Man Photo above by Gerome Viavant
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*Full Disclosure: You can link us to Miki Agrawal if you dig back far enough in our archives, where you’ll find a sponsored post from 2016 about the company she founded. We, however, don’t know Miki personally (and even if we did know her personally, we still wouldn’t give a shit about what she chose to do at Burning Man this year).
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