Breaking news in the Australian culture wars: Breasts Are Back!
Not in the way this phrase crops up in the pages of fashion magazines, which for years alerted women excitedly to the vogueish annual fluctuations between "flat as a board" and "Dita von Teese". Spikes and troughs that persist to this day and now indeed power a major global industry based at one end on Ozempic and at the other on breast implants.
(Kaz Cooke once drily noted her own feelings of confusion at learning that breasts were back, having been too busy to realise that hers had been knocking around in the back of the cutlery drawer with the sporks.)
No: breasts are back this week because at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, Arj Barker – a visiting American comedian of longstanding and staggering commercial appeal to Australian audiences – over the weekend asked breastfeeding mother Trish Faranda to remove her baby from his show.
Key points: Ms Faranda is part of the 700-strong audience at Barker's show (advertised as 15+) with family members and her seven-month-old daughter Clara. Clara starts fussing and so Ms Faranda pops her on the boob. Barker, bothered by the noise, asks her from stage to take the baby outside — an interaction made significantly more mortifying by the fact that she initially thinks he's joking.
Eventually, she leaves the theatre, accompanied by her child and family members, AND a handful of sympathetic women and one man who walk out in solidarity, AND – according to reports from those present – a smattering of cheers, jeers and calls of "get out" which Ms Faranda horrifiedly interprets as being directed towards her, and Barker says he thinks might have been directed at him.
What does it matter? This stuff is rich enough culture-war catnip that the details are immaterial. Famous man kicks out breastfeeding mum – it writes itself.
In the ensuing days, the protagonists fan out across relevant news magazine shows. These are well-worn tracks. Women have been tut-tutted for breastfeeding in public regularly enough in this country over the years that we all know where the battle lines lie.
It's only a decade ago that David Koch was subjected to a small but concerted outbreak of lactivism outside Seven's Sunrise studios after saying that he thought breastfeeding in public was fine so long as women avoided "high traffic areas" and were "a bit classy about it".
Kochie was reflecting at the time on a news story about Liane Webster, a holidaying mum at an aquatic centre at Bribie Island who was asked to cover up when feeding her baby near the pool.
Now, David Koch has opinions and he is of course entitled to (sorry) express them.
It's worth enjoying his remarks again today, and not just because they were made by a man who spent much of his morning TV career with his hands literally on the udders of the Cash Cow. In contemporary times, the concept of anyone even remotely related to the Seven Network — which has of late misidentified a mass murderer on live TV, paid out for intimate services for an accused rapist, and sunk millions into defending a guy who hired a private investigator to track his girlfriend to an abortion clinic to make sure she went through with it – enjoining anyone at all to "stay classy" is, well … it's just very, very funny.
And there is a reason why women get annoyed by this stuff. Being told what to do by someone who has never known the joy of trying to hold a "modesty cloth" over the face of a nursing baby who is having the time of its GODDAMN life and assumes this to be a new and pleasing game of peek-a-boo is annoying. I'm sorry, chaps, it just is.
I write as a woman who was incautious enough to have two babies during Australia's aggressive prime ministerial asset-recycling scheme that operated from 2009 to 2015, and was called back off maternity leave not once but TWICE to take my eye off actual babies in order to cover the fallout of fully grown politicians chucking the toys out of the pram.
On the day that Julia Gillard was marched out of office by her own team, I conducted half an hour of live commentary on ABC Sydney radio while nursing my six-month-old daughter to keep her quiet, while Drive host Richard Glover and fellow guest David Marr carried on without batting an eyelid.
Why did I take my six-month-old daughter into work instead of leaving her with a babysitter? Because she was the first of my kids I'd managed to breastfeed exclusively. This was a major triumph for someone who could never express milk at the rate of more than ten millilitres AN HOUR, but it's fair to say that this achievement went, if you'll excuse me, completely tits-up when a Canberra coup required me to be available.
LoadingWhat does this all have to do with Arj Barker and boobs?
A fair question. And yes, this column has already involved way too much personal information about the writer.
But these situations are full of personal information. They are populated with differing experiences and emotional triggers, and these are things which make life complicated, and culture wars aren't good with detail.
Real life is more nuanced. And in recent days when listening to actual people talk about the Arj Barker situation, it's been clear that opinion on this matter doesn't divide along gender lines. There are plenty of women arguing that a comedy show isn't a great place to take a seven-month-old baby. Barker says he had no idea Trish Faranda was breastfeeding her child – he just heard a baby making noises, found it distracting, worried that the audience also found it distracting, and acted accordingly.
I don't know Barker, but I do know how hard it is to see anything in detail from a brightly lit stage, so I reckon he's fair dinkum on this. And he was, at the time, inhabiting the very specific brain space that comedians move into at such times, which is "How'm I doing? Is this joke landing? Is everyone loving me enough?" Having never been a breastfeeding mother, this man is not thinking: "Gosh. I hope this lady who's finally getting a night out is feeling OK about her baby."
Why would he? He's never been in that position, and never felt the sick throb of shame that occurs when even one person thinks you're being a bad mum, let alone a roomful of 700 of them. Does this make him a bad guy? Nope.
The very interesting question here is the degree of subconscious tolerance of interruption. Arj Barker has of course performed in millions of venues, in front of millions of people. He is laser-trained to work through hecklers and dickheads. Every comedian is. Is there a reason why a baby is more annoying than a drunken lout yelling stuff?
The Barker incident's aftershocks were themselves richly comedic. Ms Faranda went on The Project on Monday night, accompanied by Clara, and was asked on-air by host Sarah Harris to perhaps hand the child to Dad because she was getting a bit fritzy. No-one could accuse Harris – a mum of two – of ignorance about baby management. But she was in the zone of being good at her job, just like Barker.
Yesterday morning, Barker appeared on Nine's Today program, announcing that he had specifically requested Karl Stefanovic as "the only person I want to talk to". And yeah, if I were a dude in damage control, I would absolutely choose the TV presenter who is (and I mean this in a loving way) a one-man subliminal mood-board of career crisis survival.
Barker, during the interview, did not mention Ms Faranda or her kid by name. And he concluded, after saying how upset he was that Australians might think he was a bad guy (which as he and Stefanovic both agreed he isn't) with this gag:
"Well, I want to offer her child a complimentary ticket to my show, and it's post-dated 2039."
Funny, sure. But tonally off. The best way for this asymmetry of perception to be fixed – to the actual satisfaction of all concerned – would be person to person, not Clash Of The TV Appearances.
Perhaps the best approach for Barker (who is in a committed relationship, fortunately, and thus will not feel the sting of this incident's effect on his Tinder rating) might have been to have his people find Ms Faranda and shout her a day out for her family.
The art of reading the room
On Monday night, I was fortunate enough to see the British writer Adam Kay's superb comedic stage version of his bestselling memoir This Is Going To Hurt, which covers his years as a doctor in the NHS. He's written two books now, both nuanced and hysterically funny and incorporating tragedy as well as a lengthy account of how, as an emergency room doctor, he once retrieved a Kinder Surprise egg from the vagina of a woman who had hidden an engagement ring inside it, as an extremely novel Leap Year stunt for her intended.
In the fourth row of his packed audience at Sydney's Enmore Theatre was a woman holding a baby (of which Kay delivered thousands in his old job) and Kay asked her how old the babe was.
"Three months!" she reported as the child slumbered on in its sling.
"Congratulations – how lovely!" said Kay. "Also congratulations you're not at Arj Barker's show, because you'd be out of here!"
Kay then later read the absolute riot act to another patron right up the front who had their mobile phone out – not to take photos, but to scroll through or check messages, which was very obvious to Kay, owing to phones being more glowing than babies. Kay asked several times for the punter to put it away, and finally declared the audience member to be "a disgrace to Australia".
We all have our triggers. We all are guilty of not spotting the anxieties that plague others.
We all fear looking bad in public, whether it's because our baby is making noise or because we want our jokes to land in exactly the spot we'd envisioned.
Fate is the greatest comedian of all, and if we all loosened our grip on the trigger finger a tiny bit, perhaps we'd all better enjoy the joke.
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2024-04-23 19:00:00Z
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