Rumer Willis didn’t expect to face backlash for posting photos of herself breastfeeding her daughter, Louetta, on social media.
“I didn’t think it was that big of a thing because I grew up in a naked house,” the actress, 35, told People in an interview published Monday.
“You know what I mean? I didn’t grow up in a house where we had shame about being naked, ever. I didn’t think I was posting that crazy of things even for me — I know I can be a little escándalo.”
Willis also shut down the notion that women should be forced to breastfeed in private.
“I’m like, ‘Really? How would you feel if I told you to lock yourself in a little cubicle at the airport when you wanted to eat?’” she said. “I’m feeding my kid. It’s not sexual unless you’re making it that way.”
The eldest daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore also noted that critics have lambasted her for sharing photos of little Lou not fully covered up.
“I posted the cutest photo of her where you can literally see the line of her butt on my Instagram, and I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, and people literally went off on me as if I had posted an up-close photo of her vagina,” she recalled. “They were like, ‘The sexual predators. This is horrific. Shame on you.’ Blah, blah, blah.”
Rumer doubled down that her trolls were the ones “making it sexual,” saying it was just “a crack in her butt.”
“I’ve gotten stopped from posting old pictures of myself where you can see my little 3-year-old-person nipples,” she noted.
The “Dancing With the Stars” alum, who shares Louetta with her boyfriend, Derek Richard Thomas, shared that she is quite cautious about posting her daughter’s face online despite having shown the 1-year-old’s button-nosed facade in an Instagram photo when she was first born.
“We’re in such a weird kind of world where I don’t know if I should, I don’t know if I should not,” she said. “I don’t know if by hiding her for too long, that’s going to create more of a thing. It’s a weird world to live in with these decisions that we have to make.”
While Rumer finds parenting in the digital age difficult to navigate, she also said she feels “we’re in an era that is really waking up to the power that is in motherhood.”
“I know, for me, giving birth in my house and having that moment and going through that, you just tap into a power greater than yourself,” she said. “I think when you give birth and you go through that transition into motherhood that it really deepens that power in yourself.”
She continued, “Then you go through postpartum, and it’s this weird, shared, lonely journey sometimes because there’s so much that people don’t talk about.”
Rumer believes society has lost a sense of community when it comes to support for mothers.
“I think, for me, what’s so important … is I want to create a more intentional community for women to be able to share their experiences, share their choices,” she said.
The “Empire” alum gave birth to Louetta, her first child, at her home on April 18, 2023.
“You are more than we ever dreamed of,” she wrote on Instagram at the time along with a since-deleted photo of her newborn’s sleeping face.
Rumer announced her pregnancy in December 2022 by revealing her baby bump — just one month after she and Thomas confirmed their relationship on Instagram.
