Man Ranting on Facebook About Breastfeeding in a Pub Gets Schooled by Hundreds of Moms
(iStockPhoto/AntonioGuillem)
It must be so hard to be a dude with an opinion that nobody cares about, but that’s the situation in which poor Bristol pubgoer Sheldon Sparks finds himself after complaining to the Internet about seeing a woman breastfeeding, only to be told to shut up and mind his own business.
The 49-year-old man went to a pub called the Spotted Cow in Bedminster, Bristol, on Mother’s Day, and while he was there, he saw a woman “flop a breast out” and feed a small child. Sparks took extreme umbrage at the idea that this woman was spending her first Mother’s Day having a break with her partner at a pub and not at a park gazing adoringly at her child under a tree somewhere.
He also claims he kept an accurate and logical tally of the number of drinks the woman had, so he seems to think he had a scientific reason for writing a long-winded screed on a local Facebook group that evening.
Here’s the assholery in full:
Look, Sheldon, I’m sorry that your parents named you Sheldon and didn’t make sure to teach you to capitalize properly, but this would have been a good time to STFU.
Alas, I have been robbed of the ability to be the first person to tell Sheldon Sparks to shut up, because after he took to their local Facebook group to complain, he was astonished to be told to shut up by hundreds of other local women, who pointed out that five-week-old babies can’t exactly go to the park and ride the slide or enjoy a nice game of kickball. Tons of them related their own stories of taking their kids on nature walks and to the park for whole-day excursions, only to stop in at a pub for a bite and a glass of wine on the way back home and be harassed by random, Sheldon Sparks-like men who asked why they were at the pub and not the park.
Hundreds of people, mostly women, replied to Sparks’ post explaining in detail why he was an oaf whose opinions nobody cared about, and to explain in detail why a five-week-old baby doesn’t necessarily enjoy the playground, and why a mother is allowed to nurse in public without a cover and not care what the Sparkses of the world think about it. Nobody showed up to back up Sparks.
The Daily Mail found the original mother Sparks was attacking, and she was pissed. She also pointed out that Sheldon’s not as good at monitoring the drinks of strange women as he thinks, because what she was actually doing was enjoying a spritzer, which is white wine mixed with Sprite or sparkling water. White wine spritzers are enjoyed by many nursing mothers because they’re very low alcohol, and one can generally have a spritzer and be ready to nurse again shortly. This mother says she was being careful, and that she nursed her baby at the pub, then he fell asleep and she had two spritzers, and then at home he had a bottle for his next feeding.
“I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t safe,” she said.
Sheldon Sparks deleted his original post after his jolly good haranguing by the women of Bristol, but he still doesn’t think he did or said anything wrong, and he told The Daily Mail that breasts “just shouldn’t be seen at the pub.”
“If you went to pubs or restaurants years ago people used to cover themselves up with a blanket. But to do it in full show without… I’m not going to say any more,” he said, though he probably will say more as soon as he gets a less hostile audience in front of him.
