Clarity needed on rights of babes in arms

Arj Barker’s actions may have caused a ‘Storm in a D-cup’, but they’ve also sparked a conversation we need to have

Back in the mists of time, I read an article with a headline that I thought was pretty funny. I can’t remember exactly what the story itself was about – it might even have been about the regularly reignited non-issue of mothers breastfeeding in public – but the headline was ‘Storm in a D-cup’.

We’ve had a ‘Storm in a D-cup’ in Australia this week, chucking about a bit of thunder and lightning on the pages of social media and the airwaves of commercial television. For anyone out of the loop, popular comedian Arj Barker asked mother Trish Faranda and her seven-monthold baby, Clara, who happened to be breastfeeding at the time, to leave his Melbourne Comedy Festival show.

Here’s a question – is this a story about breastfeeding in public? Or is it not?

Barker thinks not. He isn’t bothered by breastfeeding in public (why would he be?) and wasn’t aware the woman he ejected from his show was in fact breastfeeding at the time he decided enough was enough. For him, the issue was noise. The baby – in the fourth row of the theatre – was fussing, and this was distracting both for Barker and, presumably, for some members of the audience the comedian was trying to entertain.

Live performers are not television. They’re aware of what’s going on in the room, and comedy performers like Barker rely on their capacity to manipulate an audience’s concentration, laughter and silence. Barker told Faranda to leave because her noisy baby was compromising his ability to do just that, and because there had been a ticket sale policy that the show was for ages 15-plus only.

Breastfeeding, according to Barker, had nothing to do with it. But others beg to differ, simply because women like Trish Faranda, who are exclusively breastfeeding their babies, can’t really go anywhere without their babies.

Faranda wanted to go to the comedy show and she felt she had a right to take her baby. Probably she was aware that it’s frequently the case that ‘babes in arms’ are exempted from age restrictions. Certainly, little Clara didn’t elicit any concern from the front-ofhouse staff who, arguably, might have been responsible for telling Faranda she couldn’t bring her baby to the gig.

Barker describes his request for Faranda to leave, issued from centre stage, as ‘polite’. Unsurprisingly, Faranda said she felt humiliated by it. In the tsunami of online opinions on this matter, several people have pointed out that the woman and baby could have been much more subtly approached by theatre staff.

But questions of how, or whether, it might have been possible to alleviate the humiliation of being turfed out of a show, don’t go to the heart of the matter, which is: did Faranda have the right to attend the show with a babe in arms or not?

Do the rights of breastfeeding women to go anywhere they please, with a baby in tow, and of breastfed babies to receive nutrition whenever they want/need it, trump the rights of a comedian to say who should or should not attend their show, and of other audience members who’ve paid their ticket price and don’t want to listen to a squalling baby?

Predictably, the fault line has split commentators. There are those who think Barker was in the wrong, and women and babies’ rights prevail over his and the audience’s. These folks tend to follow up with the opinion that babies are really no trouble, that a seasoned performer like Barker ought to be able to overcome any disruption and that as a society we ought to be more tolerant of little people and their noise. (When interviewed on television after the event, with her babe in arms, Faranda demonstrated that she was very comfortable with a level of fussing and squalling that a lot of other people would find irritating.)

And then there are those who think the rights of Barker and other audience members prevail, and that

Personally, I wouldn’t have taken any of my three breastfed babies to a live theatre performance … If I didn’t have access to other care, I’d have sucked it up and stayed home