Photo: Instagram
She was just feeding her baby.
By Rebecca Jane Stokes — Written on Aug 03, 2019
It is common knowledge that the best possible thing for most babies to eat is breast milk. For some women, breastfeeding isn't possible, and you know what, that is ALSO fine! For whatever reason (I know the reason, it's the patriarchy) the subject of how and when women breastfeed is still a hot button issue with many people, particularly those without breasts. Who is HeatheredEffect? Her real name is Heather Kent and she is a breastfeeding woman currently in the center of an internet controversy. The popular Twitch streamer recently had a video taken down and now she's striking back.
1. Who Is Heathered?
HeatheredEffect, a very popular Twitch streamer with over 100,000 fans if you combine her YouTube and Twitch platforms, is taking shots at Twitch itself after they removed a clip of her breastfeeding from their site without warning her they planned on doing so. In the process, they reignited a firestorm of controversy about breastfeeding in public and in general. Heather is an unexpected internet activist. Most of her videos are ASMR streams or her simply giving advice to her fans, so to see her step up and take a stand when something like this happened to one of her streams is in many respects a very pleasant surprise for breastfeeding activists.
2. The Breastfeeding Video
In a recent Livestream on Twitch, Heather took time to breastfeed her child. Bizarrely enough though the year is 2019, people still get up in arms about anything involving a woman and her breasts, even when the breasts are being used for their designed purpose — the feeding of children. While the clip itself wasn't a big deal to Heather Kent who just wanted to soothe her hungry baby, it was a big deal on the web. The clip itself had more than 20,000 views before Twitch caught wind of it and shut down it down. How did they catch wind of what she up innocently up to? Some people who saw it themselves reported it for being in violation of Twitch's terms of service.
3. Heather Strikes Back
One person who wasn't going to take all this laying down was Heather herself. When she saw what happened, she took to Twitter to share her feelings regarding the action that Twitch took. "This clip (which had over 20k views and would’ve helped tremendously with the #normalizebreastfeeding movement) was deleted by Twitch with no explanation. We obviously have a long way to go in the fight to normalize breastfeeding." While many of her fans agreed with what she was saying, there were others who refused to give an inch: the video contained nudity, and because of that and that alone it had to come down, plain and simple.
4. Fighting The Good Fight
But Heather wasn't going to let the matter die, she insisted on continuing to fight for her right to breastfeed whenever and wherever she wants and this time she brought receipts! That's right, Heather actually took the time to pull up Twitch's terms of service so that she could reference them. For Heather, the most important point she wanted to make was about the context of her reported "nudity." The stream where she was breastfeeding was an educational one and at no point was there anything even remotely sexy or suggestive about the content that she was sharing. To her way of thinking, this meant that her breastfeeding didn't cross a service violating line.
5. Serious Pushback
But still, push back continued and Heather was floored. So much so that she took the time to speak out again. "I thought that I would get some creepy comments because it’s Twitch. But I’ve honestly been shocked by the negative community reaction as a whole. It seems like there are a lot fewer people coming to my defense in terms of breastfeeding, and it’s been a little shocking and a little demoralizing and kind of sad. It’s actually put me in a corner where I feel like I actually need to take a stand for this because clearly there’s a lot of minds that need to be changed or enlightened when it comes to breastfeeding, I think there’s still a lot of things that are misunderstood," she said.
6. How Twitch Responded
As of this publication, the clip in question is still down but Twitch issued a statement agreeing that breastfeeding in a video should be permissable.. Thankfully, Heather didn't experience any other mistreatment from the streaming platform, she wasn't suspended or banned and ideally the stand she took will make it clear that women are no longer content to sit around and let the world tell us that doing something our bodies were made to do (if we so choose) is slutty, sexual, shameful or in any way wrong. I'm glad Heather took this stand, but I'm also kind of nauseated that this is even still an issue in the first place.
Rebecca Jane Stokes is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York with her cats, Batman and Margot. She's an experienced generalist with a passion for lifestyle, geek news, pop culture, and true crime.